The other day I put up a few thoughts on externalism and cognitive science. Now I should note that externalism is a pretty broad term and relates to many different (and sometimes incompatible) positions. There's spatial externalism or the idea that the brain isn't all there is to the mind. There's temporal externalism or the idea that some contents depend upon states other than the present. One could go on. Externalism has long been an interest of mine primarily because I tend to recognize in myself a tendency to compartmentalize objects and then treat those objects as self contained and reacting only to various inputs. I think that while this is often useful as a first order approximation it fails as one thinks about it.
Part of the problem is that one can always make this appear true if one is liberal enough with how one characterizes input and output. For instance one could isolate out the United States, treat it as an object, and then say it's internal states depend only on its prior state plus input. But input would have to be defined so broadly as to perhaps lose its utility.
I think the same is true of cognitive analysis of the mind.
Allow me a few examples. Consider hormones and how those affect our cognitive processes. We're all familiar with this and clearly the hormones can't be seen as part of the brain. But do we consider them merely an input to the brain? If so, then does that mean any chemical entering the brain is just an other "input"? I can see calling information as input. But when all chemical processes become input then something seems wrong. Ditto to things like temperature and so forth.
Once you allow that cognitive processes are very much wrapped up in chemistry as well as information signals then I think the whole "brain as self-contained computing device" loses a lot of its attraction.
Allow me a few examples. Consider hormones and how those affect our cognitive processes. We're all familiar with this and clearly the hormones can't be seen as part of the brain. But do we consider them merely an input to the brain? If so, then does that mean any chemical entering the brain is just an other "input"? I can see calling information as input. But when all chemical processes become input then something seems wrong. Ditto to things like temperature and so forth.
Once you allow that cognitive processes are very much wrapped up in chemistry as well as information signals then I think the whole "brain as self-contained computing device" loses a lot of its attraction.
Information processing in the brain is a combination of electrical (action potential) and chemical (neurotransmitters) It is through the combination of the two actions that information is processed in the brain. There is not a split between ‘chemistry’ and ‘information signals’. Chemistry in the brain is an information signal. Electrical information passes along the nerve until it comes to the gap which separates one nerve from another. In order to cross this gap, the electrical impulse must be converted into chemicals which cross the gap. When these chemicals are taken up by the other nerve, they are converted back to an electrical impulse.
The source of most hormonal production is the brain. The brain will signal a hormonal producing gland to begin producing hormones. Hormones are chemical information packets. They are secreted into the blood stream. As it circulates it will activate certain cells leading to changes in select parts of the body. Interestingly enough, most hormones molecules are too large to pass through the blood/brain barrier and thus have little affect on the brain. One, testosterone, is small enough but once across the barrier it is converted to a female hormone.
What distracts the brain, I believe, are the signals the brain receives from those areas being acted upon by the testosterone. As the intensity increases, these signals increasingly compete for awareness. Have you ever had an itch on the bottom of your foot while wearing shoes and socks. At first you try to ignore it but finally you have to take off your sock and shoe so you can scratch it regardless of whatever else you are doing. Then there is the pull side of things. While this is going on another part of your brain is saying “Remember boy’o all that dopamine that will be produced. And, all the pleasure we will receive from it.”
So it is not the hormone itself that effects the brain but the effect these hormones have on the body and the transfer of this information back to the brain. The problem the brain has is that these incoming signals, from other parts of the body, demand increasing amounts of attention. We only have a finite amount of attention to parse. If we take more attention for one set of signals, we have less attention to apply for other signals.
Temperature is simply one of the signals the skin membrane sends to the brain. It too can increase in intensity and demands on attention. As my wife likes to say, “I’m so hot I can’t think.” It can also go the other way.
By the way, I had already written responses to two other articles comprising about 1.5 pages each. And I agonize over almost every word. Unfortunately Word (grrrrr) crashed on me twice wiping out all that I had written. And, yes, I freely admit I’m writing challenged. I’m in the process of reconstructing those replys.
Rich
Rich Knapton:
It's doubtful that an electro-chemical pulse comprises of itself a "unit" of information. And I think you're confusing a bit mechanism and information, though that's a tough nut to crack, since what's mechanism at one level becomes information at another level, or vice versa. "Information" is likely generated through anatomical conjunctions and connections between neuronal groups and variable patterns of synaptic connections, which can strengthen or weaken over time. Information, such as memory, is likely not so much in the neuron as in the synaptic connections between neurons, and any information contained in the neuron would be like the tiniest shard of a hologram, with how it "appears" depending on the connections and activity of surrounding neurons.
I think the point Clark is getting at, though I wouldn't claim to speak for him, is a kind of anti-brain-in-a-vat one. Brain and mind are not somehow the same or identical, such that mind is either reducible to physical brain processes or strictly parallel with them. Not only does mindedness require embodiment and extend into it, such that brain-body interactions must be understood in terms of their mutual implications as a "whole", but mind/brain embodiment extends into its relation to the environment/world, such that the brain does not simply generate a representation of the environment, but its interactions with the environment too are part of the "whole" process. (Of course, animals exist as a function of their adaption to the environment; only humans have a world and exist in that world, orienting themselves in that world through meaning-processing and the projection of its meaning-horizons, since only humans possess or are possessed by natural language). Otherwise put, were there a brain-in-a-vat, that brain and its mindedness would extend into its vat. The supposed skeptical point of brain-in-a-vat examples is disarmed thereby, or, if there is a skeptical point to such examples, it lies in the entanglements of the vat and not in the brain/vat relation.
I would agree, if it's part of what you're getting at, that brain processing is highly distributed, without any "homunculus" orchestrating the whole "show", such that brain processing operates in part through selectionist mechanisms, with different processes and signals competing for predominance. We ourselves, in all the splendor and misery of our personalities, are but fragile emergences from such endlessly complex selective processes.
By temperature I didn't mean temperature in the sense of information about one part of the body. Rather I meant the physical temperature of the brain. (Think of the effects of a bad fever) Likewise while the brain produces many hormones it doesn't produce all of them. (Think testosterone) The effects of hormones on brain function can't be reduced to mere information input. Likewise drugs that pass the blood brain barrier. And so forth.
John pretty well explained my point. The brain can't be considered in isolation from the rest of the body. Brain processes are in a holistic relationship with the rest of the body. The effects of the rest of the body on the brain can't be reduced to information without expanding the meaning of "input" to such an extent as to render it nearly meaningless.
John, thank you for your reply. I really appreciated it. I write so I can expose my thoughts. Not all of which are correct and it’s hard for me to see the difference.
It's doubtful that an electro-chemical pulse comprises of itself a "unit" of information.
You are, of course, correct. Probably what I should have written was there are electrical and chemical channels by which information is processed. My point is writing what I did was to address the impression I had from Clark’s response that there are two separate entities in the brain: chemicals and information systems. What I was trying to say was that chemicals are not separate from information systems but rather another aspect of the system.
I think the point Clark is getting at, though I wouldn't claim to speak for him, is a kind of anti-brain-in-a-vat one.
I can’t agree more. I tried to write that we should not view the brain and the body as totally separate entities. Sensory deprivation studies have shown that if one interferes with the flow of sensory information from the body, the brain becomes unstable and the person can become quite mad. Thus, the brain-in-the-vat metaphor is quite useless.
Brain and mind are not somehow the same or identical, such that mind is either reducible to physical brain processes or strictly parallel with them.
If Clark’s objection is that I don’t explain the ‘mind’ then he is quite right. I’m not that presumptuous. ☺)
Not only does mindedness require embodiment and extend into it, such that brain-body interactions must be understood in terms of their mutual implications as a "whole",
I think part of the problem is trying to describe linearly a process which is not linear at all. While ‘mindedness’ requires embodiment, this embodiment need not come from the body itself. If is far more likely that the embodiment is generated within the brain itself. The brain generates a neural map of the body. If one could peer inside one would not seen exact copy of our body. Rather, we would see parts of the body in what would seem to be random placement. In other words, that neural map which represents the foot may lie close to the neural map which represents the shoulder. Say your foot itches. That sensation is sent to the brain to whatever section of the brain that can interpret those signals as itches. The sensation is then assigned to the foot. This is probably done all at the same time through neural loops connecting all parts of our neural bodily maps with the sensation detecting parts of the brain. Our consciousness has no accesses to the neural body maps. So while the action is occurring in the neural foot, consciousness projects it onto the physical foot.
Before I get accused of brain-in-the-vat viewpoint again, the brain needs the input from the body itself. Without that input, the brain ceases to function as a normal brain. Nevertheless, mindedness does not need direct connection to the body to be embodied. It only needs access to the body’s neurological doppelganger.
but mind/brain embodiment extends into its relation to the environment/world, such that the brain does not simply generate a representation of the environment, but its interactions with the environment too are part of the "whole" process.
You write that very well. But it obscures more than it enlightens. How does the embodiment of the mind/brain extend itself in its relation to the environment? How does one become embodied with the environment? Anatomically how does this happen? What interactions are you talking about and what is the whole process? I’m sitting here 100% disabled with a brain damaged because of combat trauma. I want to understand what happened. I first need to understand how the brain operates. However, I can’t get there from here with what you have so beautifully written.
Of course, animals exist as a function of their adaptation to the environment;
Animals exist because they have developed coping skills to deal with the environment. And, through their ability to alter their environment. What are these skills and how do they operate? We have inherited many of these skills and they help us also to exist.
only humans have a world and exist in that world, orienting themselves in that world through meaning-processing and the projection of its meaning-horizons, since only humans possess or are possessed by natural language).
Can’t agree. All animals have a perceptual world. Those perceptions contain affectively based valuation. This is one of my points. As an animal we share in that ability to create perceptual worlds just like any other animal. And, as with all other animals, the valuation of that perceptual world (knowledge) is based on affection not language. All animals therefore interact with their perceptual world in the first person. Only man seems to have the ability to interact with his perceptual world in the third person. And, this is based on our logical abilities not affection. Thus we have not one but two ways to interact with the environment. The determination on which way will be used is whether we are approaching the environment in the first person or in the third person.
Rich
Test
Rich, it might help if you could explain what you mean by input. I'm taking input as purely informational or signals. It seems to me you're taking it as a much, much more expansive sense.
Rich Knapton:
These matters are very complicated, with many layers and levels and interaction between levels and interconnected tangles of issues (and tissues). Discussions of these matters can be virtually endless and perhaps endlessly confused and confusing.
I'll start with that issue of "world". The point is that only humans, because they "have" natural language with its recombinant symbolism, have a "world" and ek-sist, i.e. stand out, in it. That point is important not only because much of our "higher" mental capacity, including our self-consciousness and first person sense of self, though "housed" and sustained by neural processing, is owed to and only exists because of our ability to interact communicatively with others across the world. (This point cuts against those who would insist that the first person perspective is absolutely primitive and irreducible and prevents any possibility of explanation of whatever degree). And because language results in a tremendous expansion of our semantic range and capacity, allowing for extended and counterfactual discursive reasoning about the world and "things" that appear in it. But most of all because language endows us with a certain degree of transcendence in the world, whereby we can to some degree step outside of ourselves, externalize our mental capacities in words, and look "back" upon, scrutinize, reflect upon and analyze mental phenomena. I'm not reducing mental phenomena to linguistic terms, just pointing to a tight connection between the two in terms of how we are constrained to talk about them. (I would consider mathematical operations and formal models symbolic, if not exactly lingistic in nature, so they conjoin the basic point). All discussions and inquiries about mental phenomena take place on the basis of this half-way "outside", externalized standpoint. I would add here that I think discussions and debates centered around issues of externalism vs. internalism still contain a residue of the Cartesian set-up of a sheerly physical external world and a sollipsistic mentality, an exclusive disjunction between I and it, first and third person perspectives, missing the crucial and generative role of the second person perspective, the relation to the other.
Now the focus here today is not the relation of the mental to the linguistic, nor a complete explanation of "mind" as a "whole". (One of the basic points I make against the way issues are often discussed in analytic "philosophy of mind" is that there is no such "thing" as mind, that there are rather various mental phenomena, properties and capacities, which are not necessarily all of a piece or singularly integrated, that there is a need to distinguish between levels as well as kinds of mental "functionings", such as those aspects of our embodied mindedness that belong to the linguistic socio-cultural possibilities of our experience and those that involve underlying naturalistic features, and that there are no clear lines of demarcation between the mental, the behavioral, and the physiological, but rather all three likely interact in generating phenomena that we are wont to identify as "mental"). No, our topic today is the causal physical/physiological explanation of emergent mental phenomena. (You say that you are not so presumptuous as to explain "mind", but you are referencing mental "functionings" both as explanandum and explanans in you accounts, eh?) Now I am one who believes that such explanations are possible and that "we" will arrive at adequate explanatory accounts in full empirical detail eventually up to a certain explanatory limit. Though "we” are not anywhere near there as yet, there are many "live" productive research programs underway in the field nowadays from many disciplines and many angles. However, I don’t think that the causal explanation of the mental is really a philosophical question. Rather I think it is a scientific matter of neurophysiology within an evolutionary perspective. (The knotty empirical and conceptual questions that would be involved in arriving at an adequate causal account are to be worked out by researchers in the field among themselves; philosophers might contribute something helpful, but more likely they’d contribute arguments that are silly, abstruse, or misleading. Argument is an ambiguous word, and there is pleasure and excitement, whether licit or not, is the discharge of aggressive energies).
Now I think part of the problem with your brain-centric views, which I dubbed “Berkeleyan materialism” in an earlier comment thread here, insofar as I understand them, is that they still betray the grip of a residual Cartesian set-up, and, ironically enough, in the light of your emphasis on precise neurophysiological details and mechanisms, they are insufficiently biological in an evolutionary perspective. There’s still a bit of the brain-in-a-vat operating in your way of thinking about the problem. Now animals exist as organizations of organic causality that delimit themselves from their environment and interact with environmental causal processes in a somewhat separated way. To say that they adapt to their environments is true, but can be in danger of being an empty truism, virtually tautological and uninformative. (When Dawkins writes of behavior as an “extended phenotype” he’s perhaps extending his metaphor a bit too far, in accordance with his reductionist, gene-centric and strict adaptionist tendencies, assuming a genetic determination of behavior not quite entirely in evidence and somewhat obscuring the issue of the behaviors to be explained). If the organism exists as a function of adaption to its environment, what the environment is is partly a function of the organic life-process of the organism and the salient features selected in the environment in terms of which it adapts. In other words, the organism/environment relation is partly a modal one, and is not so much an either/or disjunction or opposition, but a both/and interaction. That would begin to go to the point about how animal embodiment extends into its relations to its environment and how that process needs to be understood as a “whole”. (I basically agree with your point about affective imprinting, though I would call that “selection for salience” and think that it would likely be more broadly ramified and complex than the account you offer. The route through the amygdula would be roughly the same for the relatively less complex and differentiated “mentality” of a mouse, as for the more complex affectivity and behavior of an ape or human).
But this leads onto a much broader and quite basic point about Darwinian evolution through natural selection and the peculiar power of selectionist explanation to explain evolutionary emergence, diversification and novelty. A selectionist explanation is to be distinguished from an “instructionalist” explanation, in which there would be pre-defined functions and “transparent” or pre-compatibilized information. (In my view, Daniel Dennett gives a wrong-headed account of Darwinian evolution, and his account is actually a subtlely skewed form of instructionalism rather than a properly selectionist account). The whole point is that there is not to begin with any predefined “functions”, nor any “transparent” information somehow “out there”, but the evolutionary process of gradual emergence itself generates the “functions” and the environmental information, by which organisms match their life-processes to the features of their environment. And the main point to evolution, which is radically non-teleological and mostly does not lead to increased complexity and novel levels of emergence, is that it is required to “solve” the “Red Queen” problem of running in place; that is, species that don’t adapt and evolve in the face of exogenous climatic, environmental or ecological changes eventually go extinct, and those that do, give rise to further speciations. And it’s within that very broad prospect that the evolution of neural systems and of emergent novelty and complexity, from the earliest tiny worms to elephants and, coincidentally, humans, needs to be seen.
The environment of organisms, of course, includes other organisms, and organisms co-evolve in eco-systems, But the main point here is that emergent mental capacities or properties to the extent that they occur at all derive from the adaptive needs of organic metabolisms and their “matching” with their ecological niches, which rounds out the point that brains need to be understood together with their embodiment, even as embodiment extends into behavioral interactions with the environment. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that brains are just a kind of membrane, assimilating environmental resources and eliminating toxins, but that does make the point of how neural processing arises from the mediation of organic metabolism with its environment. You’re right about the existence of neural maps of the body, and as a matter of established empirical embryological fact in developmental biology, each brain maps its specific body in the course of developmental “wiring”. But brains also do other things besides mapping; most importantly, brains categorize sense perceptions, which is perhaps the most basic and primitive properly mental “function”. But, perhaps due to some residue of cognitive functionalism in your thinking, I think you’re abstracting and misplacing the role of such mappings, and missing their two-way interfacing between brain and body and the way they “function” within a “whole” organic process which brings about the proprioceptive orientation of the organism toward and in its environment. And whereas you’re right that brain processes are “nonlinear” or, as I put it, “highly distributed” and quite literally loopy, I think you need to consider that more complex and differentiated mentalities arising from brain processes, insofar as that occurs in a relatively few species, emerge in distinct gradual steps from evolutionary selection pressures and confer specific selective advantages, such that their specific properties and capacities are not simply an “internal” matter of brain processing, but largely an external matter of the adaptive behaviors that they “endow”. Through re-entrant connections, whereby processing “results” can be fed back into the processes from which they derive, forming more “sophisticated” aggregates, integrations, or syntheses, and through the brain developing mappings of its own processes, such that it can re-categorize its own categorizations, putting brain processes on the path toward developing semantic abilities, more complex and differentiated neurally emergent “mentalities” can form, allowing more complex behaviors relatively unchained from fixed instinctual programs and involving capacities to treat percepts as signs, draw behavioral inferences and rely on learning, and even to learn to treat signs communicatively, resulting in social behaviors relatively unchained from fixed instinctual responses. Presumably, instincts then themselves co-evolve to become internested with and reliant on learned behaviors and more or less complex inference patterns. My view, taken from Arnold Gehlen, is that humans have evolved to the point where their instincts have become so recessive and “plastic” that they are born organically insufficient for adequate functioning, such that they must rely on a cultural structuration of their instincts, so that, for us, culture and biology interpenetrate, and our organic deficiency makes culture organically necessary for our successful “adaptive” existence. Human beings “adapt” as much to their relations with others in a socio-cultural world, as to a physical environment, and their adaption to and of the physical environment is largely mediated through their adaption to relations with others. That is part of what is meant by saying that only humans have a world, rather than just an adaption to an environment, which is what makes them distinctively human and endowed with distinctively human capacities. And without that world, they would not be distinctively human, nor exercize the capacities that “make” them so. But none of this results from an internal or inherent teleology of brain-processing per se, but rather results externally and contingently from a long series of steps.
As to the perceptual “worlds” of animals, animals exist in a specious present, responding to environmental events or cycles of events. (Wittgenstein:” It may very well make sense to say that a dog expects his master home this afternoon; it makes no sense to say that a dog expects his master home in a fortnight.”) Only humans can respond the environmental events counterfactually in terms of meaning-interpretations and selective alternatives for future possibilities, because of language. Heidegger puts the point in a somewhat grand style: animals are poor in world, man is rich in world. It’s also a bit odd for you to refer to animals “creating” their perceptions: perceptions occur. That’s no doubt an effect of your brain-centric internalism. And to speak of animals developing coping skills is also a bit odd, at once a bit anthropomorhic and reductive-instrumentalist. Animals evolve adaptive behaviors and could be said to largely be those adaptive behaviors. Only a relatively few species evince much capacity for learned behavior. Again, animals need to be understood as the distinctive sorts of beings that they are through their relation to the external environment which their life-process as a whole is adapted to. And brain processes emerge at the “edge” of that relation, mediating it.
Finally, it’s a bit odd to say that only the brain needs is the body’s “neurological doppelgaenger”. You’re well aware for one that brains impose high energy and developmental costs, which is a major constraint on their evolutionary “development”. And, though I’m well aware of phantom limbs and other such anomalous neural phenomena, you effectively treat the brain abstractively as if it were an artefact, rather than organic part of an evolved organism. You shouldn’t so readily confuse a model for the actual “system” being modeled. That the brain is something that has emergently evolved is an important aspect to understanding the features it has and how and why it would work in the ways it would work. 100 billion neurons in the human brain is an immense number, not to mention the possible number of synaptic connections and the minute temporal frequencies of neural pulses in real time processing. To me, that suggests its evolved nature, both because it suggests a high degree of redundancy and robustness that one would expect from a highly survivable system, and because it suggests that the brain goes about “solving” its problems in rather round-about ways, as one would expect from a “system” that evolved and emerged by “solving” problems that had not only never been solved before, but didn’t even exist before their “solving”, in contrast to the directedness and streamlined solutions you’d expect for a specifically designed system.
Nice discussion. Thanks. I don't have much to add. It sounds like I found someone who thinks close to what I do but has the intellectual chops to explain it much better.
Another well written response. I think, however, if we boil down your response, it boils down to two major thoughts. The first is natural language gives man the ability to create worlds and to place himself in those worlds. The second has to do with the effect adaptation and the environment have on the evolutionary forming of the brain. I find that neither of your propositions are well grounded in scientific investigation.
“The point is that only humans, because they "have" natural language with its recombinant symbolism, have a "world" and ek-sist, i.e. stand out, in it. That point is important not only because much of our "higher" mental capacity, including our self-consciousness and first person sense of self, though "housed" and sustained by neural processing, is owed to and only exists because of our ability to interact communicatively with others across the world.”
I’m just a simple person with simple way of looking at things but your sentence makes no sense. While this may be good Heideggerism, it is terrible science. It seems to me that in order to interactively communicate (natural language) with others one must first have a sense of self and a sense of the other. Our sense of self begins forming well before we can manipulate language symbols. Dr. Greenspan MD (renowned for working with autistic children) puts it this way:
“Values and attitudes begin here [in early childhood], well before they are represented by symbols. The child’s emotions, now attached to patterns of response, provide a constant, running commentary on her behavior. Desire, expectations, and intentions are being transformed into patterns of meaning, with emotion as a guide through the increasingly complicated challenges of life. Consciousness at this stage consists of a greater awareness of others as interactive beings with purpose and even some predictability. The world of discrete units of interaction is now one of patterns, And the awareness of self and others for the first time involves complex emotional and social expectations.” [The Growth of the Mind]
In other words, you have it backwards. First must come a sense of self then comes natural language. You continue with natural language.
“… there is a need to distinguish between levels as well as kinds of mental "functionings", such as those aspects of our embodied mindedness that belong to the linguistic socio-cultural possibilities of our experience and those that involve underlying naturalistic features, and that there are no clear lines of demarcation between the mental, the behavioral, and the physiological, but rather all three likely interact in generating phenomena that we are wont to identify as "mental").
You talk about linguistic socio-cultural possibilities of our experience. I’m sorry but our experiences are not linguistically socio-culturally encoded We are not Turing machines. We are biologically evolved beings. This must be looked at from an evolutionary perspective. In an evolutionary perspective the encoding of experience has one purpose: survival. Experience is placed into memory for future recall should similar problems arise. Let pick on Dr. Greenspan again, I could have gone to other scientists but he’s handy,
“The key to the puzzle lies in the fact that emotion organizes experience and behavior.”
“We are able to get at our stored experience so rapidly and reliably because our affective capacity organizes information is an especially functional and meaningful manner.”
“The basic realization of thinking—the true heart of the creativilty central to human life—requires lived experience, which is sensation filtered by an emotional structure that allows us to understand both what comes through the senses and what we feel and think about it as well as what me might do about it.”
I’ve already outlined the neural connections by which dual encoding is performed in the brain. We certainly can retain information provided us through natural language but for that experience to be maintained for future use it also must be duel encoded with affectation. Of course, this is how other animals encode experience as well.
Let me continue with your perspective of adaptation and evolution and what this modality means for the brain..
“If the organism exists as a function of adaption to its environment, what the environment is is partly a function of the organic life-process of the organism and the salient features selected in the environment in terms of which it adapts.”
But organisms don’t exist as a function of adaptation to the environment. You’ve made adaptation the end when it is only a means to an end. Organisms exist as a function of survival. And survival is about changing the environment. When they cease to have that ability because the environment has radically changed and their ability to change that environment no longer exists, they die as a species. Those who have developed new adaptations which allow them to change their environment for their survive continue to live. I found this great quote on the internet,
“Adaptation is not about the changing of organisms to suit the environment. It's about organisms changing the environment enough to be able to survive, or finding an environment that doesn't need changing.”
Thus, we don’t adapt to the environment. We develops tools and skills which allow us to manipulate the environment for our survival. Thus our adaptations provides us with the means to cope with and change the environment to meet our survival needs. This understanding of evolution allows us to look at the brain in terms of the tools needed for survival rather than being shaped for the environment. There is no modality here.
Let’s return to the creation of ‘worlds’.
“That is part of what is meant by saying that only humans have a world, rather than just an adaption to an environment, which is what makes them distinctively human and endowed with distinctively human capacities.”
Your misunderstanding of adaptation and environment and the function of natural language obscures you to the fact that animals create their own ‘world’ as a tool by which they manipulate their environment. I’m sure we will all agree that the mind has the capacity to create images of events. Since they develop in the brain, we can call them mental images. The significance of these mental images is encoded affectively. The aggregate of these affectively coded images compose their world.
Some irritating nigles.
“Finally, it’s a bit odd to say that only the brain needs is the body’s ‘neurological doppelgaenger’.
I find it odd that you wrote that. What I said was that the mind does not need to relate directly to the body in order to become embodied. It has access to the body maps contained within the brain. I also specifically wrote that the brain cannot operate effectively, if at all, without the body.
“You effectively treat the brain abstractively as if it were an artifact.”
No. I approach writing about the brain in a similar manner as books and articles written by neuroscientist.
Rich
[Edit: Fixed formatting for Rich - CG]
Rich Knapton:
I didn’t mention anything about infant/juvenile development, and the issue of the trajectory of development toward maturity of an individual conspecific organism is different than the issue of the emergent evolution of mental properties and capacities across large stretches of evolutionary time through variation and diversification of species. That said, it’s doubtful that human infants are born with an intact sense of self, rather than developing that sense of self in developmental stages. Likely, they are born highly keyed toward relational interactions, especially with primary care-givers, and cue in on speech, (which is as much a relational as an informational phenomenon), long before they begin to insert themselves into cirtuits of spoken communication by figuring out how to speak themselves. Citing a specialist on autism is a bit problematic though. In my limited understanding of the matter, autism amounts to a kind of relational, hence emotional-affective retardation or maldevelopment, such that, while autistic individuals might be intellectually quite bright, they lack relational and emotional intelligence, fail to pick up on and understand relational and contextual cues, and hence tend to speak in rather steroetyped, rigid and repetitive ways, while seeming somewhat emotionally “cold” or detached. Also, by their own reports, autistic individuals experience sensory confusion or overload, such that they find human relational contacts, such as touching, somewhat threatening and aversive, which is a large problem, since human affectional bonds and relations,- (and, correspondingly, the sense of security that goes with the development of a sense of self),- are in some considerable measure formed through tactile contact, such as holding, hugging, kissing, and caressing, which is presumably how the onset and diagnosis of autism emerges, in that the child reacts uncontrollably against “normal” child-rearing practices and parental expectations. The problem, though, is that, while a neural anomaly or disorder might bring out and highlight certain aspects of development through its deviance from the “normal” course, those aspects can’t be readily read back into the “normal” course in the ways that they fit together in the “normal’ case. Since I googled the name though, if the specialist you cite is Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a child psychiatrist specializing in autism, he apparently has also co-authored a book on the evolutionary development of symbolic thinking in primates up to the development of natural language in humans, in a vein opposing Chomsky, Pinker and Ev. Psych., so his views on the matter might not be entirely remote from and opposed to my conjectures.
But since you raised the issue of development, I might as well point out that the human species is biologically differentiated from other species by virtue of its neotenic or pre-mature birth. If you look at a film of, say, as wildebeest being born, after the calf plops out the back-end and the cow licks it off, within minutes the calf stands up on its spindley, shakey legs and begins to walk. Humans, by contrast, are born well before they are fully neurally developed, so they don’t begin to walk until about a year after birth. There are a set of contingent evolutionary connections involved here. Neotenic birth is an offshoot of bipedal upright walking, since that narrows the birth canal and threatens to squeeze the infant’s head during birth. (Humans are not the only upright bipedal walkers that evolution has sprung up; millions of years ago, there was an upright walking monkey that evolved on the island of Sicily, after it had detached from Africa, but it walked on feet that resembled splayed hands with its hip-joint and knees still pointing outward). Once a genetic mutation had occurred, permitting neotenic birth, such that embryological rates of growth processes continue after birth, the way was presumably open for further genetic mutations along that pathway, permitting the evolution of larger and larger brains. At the same time, the extention of neotenic growth processes well after birth involved an extended period of infantile dependency and hence a need for extended support for the mother/infant pair. It’s a good guess that year-round estrus to re-enforce pair bonding, (though bonobos are actually much hornier than humans), and intensified sociality and more ramified social structures would have evolved in correlation with neotenic birth. In modern humans, the brain continues to grow embryologically until about 2 years after birth, with thousands upon thousands of neurons being produced daily, with those that hook-up in useful wirings surviving and those that don’t dying off. (It’s partly an “internal Darwinian” process, involving large numbers and selection). Note then that as the human infant is first experiencing the world, its brain is still growing intensively and intensively wiring its connections in interaction with incoming experiences. It’s probably not quite a coincidence that as this process shuts down and new neurons are no longer added, though intensive wiring continues through neural learning and experience, human infants begin the speak. So, though human infants are on a developmental pathway toward the formation of a sense of self based on symbolic thinking, there’s some good empirical biological reason for thinking that a self is not fully there to begin with, and speech is not simply an external articulation of such a self and its fully formed experiences.
But in “boiling down” my “points”, you do seem to have entirely missed the point that I was trying to make and the level at which it occurs. What I said, was that in considering “mind”, one needs to distinguish between various mental phenomena, properties and capacities, occurring at different levels and traceable to different points of evolutionary emergence. My point was directed at some Analytic philosophers, who attempt to construe “mind” in terms of a systematic naturalism, such that meaning is entirely an effect of the mental. Mentality, embodied organic function, motivation and affect all are conditions of meaning and feed into it, but symbolic meaning and an orientation to the world in its terms only occurs at the level of and through natural language, which gives rise to a socio-cultural form of life, hence a “world”, such that humans have stepped out of the world of natural selection and environmental adaption, and become socialized persons rather than just animal organisms: we are neither gods, nor animals, and we ain’t no angels neither. (Searles, for example, seems to claim that meaning is entirely a matter of mental intentions, such that meaning is entirely generated through its “interpretant” and that “interpretant” must then in some sense be entirely self-presently or inerrantly self-interpreting). And it is only with the symbolic capacities of natural language that certain aspects of “mindfulness”, such as higher order self-consciousness, (not primary perceptual consciousness), existence in and through temporality, the projection of futural possibilities, and the awareness of death, as well as, the capacity to thematically interpret the world “as a whole”, question it, and discursively reason about it in extended fashion, can emerge and develop. This is not simply a matter of empirical scientific fact, but of “ontological” fact. (I’d guess that Clark might disagree with me here, but I view the advent of natural language and the formation of historical socio-cultural forms of life as an ontological break with the continuity of nature. It’s not that natural and biological causality cease to obtain therein, but they are no longer entirely determinative, and socio-cultural transformations of its natural environment increasingly take hold up to the modern intrusion into nature by “totalizing” forms of advanced technology). This does not deny anything that you have said about episodic experience, affective imprinting, consciousness, or neural learning,- (my only comment or criticism of that is that I think that such processes are more broadly ramified and more “deeply” rooted in interaction with bodily processes than your account seems to allow),- but the main point was that it is only at the socio-cultural level that knowledge in the full sense of the word occurs, including knowledge of these matters under discussion here, so care should be taken in decomposing the various levels of “mind” and the mental and in attributing evolutionary causal bases to them, lest later developments are read back into earlier levels and an implicit teleology take hold in conceptualizing or modelling how they are to be understood. You seemed to have completely overlooked what I briefly had to say about the categorizations in neural memory that underlie perception,- (already well before the emergence of any neurally embedded primary perceptual consciousness system),- with such categorization already being “value-weighted” in terms of the physiological and metabolic needs of the organism,- (such that the features picked out and organized into perceptual aggregates are those relevant to the life-process of the organism in its environment),- and about how further neural evolution in some instances could lead on to the development of neural mappings of brain processes themselves, such that, through the recategorization of its categorizations, brains could develop semantic capacities, make behavioral inference patterns and rely increasingly on experiential learning: all of this well prior to natural language. The main point about natural language, in this context, is that it amounts to a tremendous amplification and expansion, indeed a virtual explosion, of semantic capacities of the brains/organisms involved through the communication and reduplication of experiences and through the greatly increased scope of cooperative behaviors it allows for. I would take it that the brains of chimpanzees have considerable semantic abilities and experiments with language learning have shown that they can grasp and deploy communicative signs; but the general consensus is that they evince no grasp of syntactic structure and are not capable of sustaining anything like natural language. So the gap between humans and apes remains quite large, inspite of a high degree of genetic kinship. (Some of these matters, concerning the relation between perception and categorization and primary consciousness as a “remembered present” I discussed in comments here to a June 8 post entitled “Cybersemiotics”).
I don’t understand why you invoked Turing machines with respect to discussing natural language and its relation to experience. Universal Turing machines, usually instantiated in the von Neumann architecture of digital computers, don’t and can’t understand and interpret the symbols that they manipulate; any such understanding and interpretation belongs to the program that they run and thus ultimately to the programmer, (Searle’s “Chinese room” argument). I would maintain that brains are nothing like digital computers, that, for evolutionary-biological reason brains must be and be conceived primarily as analog pattern-matching devices. In an analog system the physical system, the physical processing, and the processing result are basically one and the same “thing”; the simplest example being a mercury thermometer, if you remove the stripes digitalizing the temperature spectrum in discrete units, and pay attention only to the more-or-less cold, cool, warm, or hot reading, (since, in the pure analog, there are not only no units, but also there is no negation, only a continuum of more-or-less). With a digital computational device, you’d need a physical processing substrate, a code written into the substrate, a program written in the code and thus ultimately a programmer. It would be hard to explain, in evolutionary terms, how such a system could have emerged on top of an organism that originally evolved for purely physical and physiological reasons, whereas emergent mental properties emerging from the continuum of analog processing is at least a good deal less of a stretch. Now, at the level of natural language, a certain digital encoding does occur in terms of phonemes and morphemes comprising linguistic signs; but that tells us little about how linguistic signs participate in the generation of meaning and of how meanings match with more-or-less complex experiences. And at any rate, “meaning” can not just be put down to a pre-given function of “survival”; “meaning” involves a transcendence and transformation of the pre-given, which is part of the predicament of the human condition in the world. I suppose I just don’t see what sort of point you’re trying to make. And I’m not sure that I would see neural memories or experiences as “encoded”, since that would imply a coding medium and I’m not sure what that would be. (If it’s an analog process, it wouldn’t need to be encoded). Perhaps such a vocabulary is useful pragmatically in considering certain levels of problems, but you’d have to explain to me its relevance.
Insofar as I can make out your views on these matters, you seem to be working from some sort of formal/functional cognitivist model, in which cognition as a function of the mental is conceived in terms of processing information, in which case it would make sense to talk in terms of inputs and outputs of information, with outputs being understood as information that is actionable for behavior, (though there would have to be further processing to arrive at such behavioral decisions), and then you’re trying to align such a model with actual empirical information about neurophysiology. Fom my point of view, the strain of such an effort results in some conceptual distortions of the matter that oddly contain residues of some of the traps of the old idealism. Indeed, that was a good part of the point that I took Clark to be making in his original above post: that conceiving of mental processes in terms of information-processing models, abstracts far too much from the embodiment of brains and the interactions between brain and body, and from the interactions between embodied brains and their environments, such that it becomes hard to discern just what informational inputs and outputs would be, since “information” comes to conflate such a disparate set of processes and matters. Indeed, I find it very odd how you resist the fairly obvious intrication of the brain in bodily physiology, while at the same time insisting on the strictly biological nature of the mental and admitting to an unexplained gap between biological mentality and what you would style the “logical-foundational”, which inexplicably only pertains to humans. I don’t know why vertebrate organization first emerged amongst ancient fishes; I’d conjecture that the reason might have been anatomical, since it might have lent itself to improved, streamlined swimming. And, though there are a lot of homeostatic equilibria involved in physiological metabolism, there’s no reason per se why they would have to be coordinated through neural regulation. But nowadays cladistics, (systematic biological classification), no longer refers to “invertebrates”, but rather to “chordates” , and it could be conjectured that the evolution of central nervous systems, i.e. spinal chords and brain stems, permitted more complex physiological metabolisms through neural regulation of bodily equilibria. In which case, the initial reason for brain evolution had everything to do with a two-way street between brain and body. Chordate evolution is not the only route open for big brainedness; there’s cephelopods, after all. But the fact of the matter is that most all brainy animals are terrestrial vertebrates or their descendants. And it’s perfectly obvious that the digestive system is evolutionarily more primitive and basic than any nervous system, and that when hunger strikes, it effectively takes over the brain. Since species populations expand to the critical limit of ecological resources, thus to the edge of starvation, which itself varies with conditions, it’s obvious that brains more responsive to hunger are more likely to survive and be selected for survival. And since brains will map whatever body-plan they are attached to and develop with, including its digestive needs, food sources, and the appendages and behaviors by which it acquires food and defends itself in its environment, the brain and its body extend into interaction with its environment. Neither brain, nor body, nor environment can be conceptualized in evolutionary terms in separation from the processes by which they interact as a “whole”. And emergent mental properties and capacities evolve, if at all, within that complex of interacting processes. Which is why one can’t speak of the brain and its mental features as a separate, self-contained, “internal” reality. And why brains can’t simply be construed as mental in nature, that mental nature consisting in information-processing, with informational inputs and outputs. Rather brains could be seen as generating the very “information” that they process, but only if they are understood in terms of their two-way interaction with their bodies and of the interaction of the two with their environments, such that the “information” that brains generate really is only generated through the “whole” of the interactive organic life process. Which is finally why the environment can’t be conceived as something wholely external to the organism, to which the organism is opposed and which it must master to survive. If one conceives of the organism as a self-identical, self-present entity, that is, in terms of traditional notions of substance, rather than in terms of temporally distended and variable, if recurrent processes, then a logic is established for conceiving of the organism as something opposed to its environment and its adaptions as tools,- (Ancient Greek, “organa” = “tools”, from which the English “organ” derives etymologically),- for coping with and mastering its environment, which leads on, sure enough, to the notion of the brain-as-information-processor as a modular tool-box serving “survival”. And, to be sure, all animals evince in one degree or another conation, in contrast to plants, which are without nervous systems and motility. But “survival” is not somehow the intentional end of an animal organism, and such means-end rationality, derived from the substance rather than the process conception, is at once, again, too anthropomorphic and too instrumentalist. Rather animals have their probability of survival increased through their degree of adaptive fitness with their environment, and those that survive to reproduce transmit their adaptive fitness to the survival of the species. (Most don’t survive to reproduce, but are eaten or killed while young). And that is what is meant by saying that animals exist as a function of adaption to their environment. Emergent mental processes amount in the first instance to more complex, if more expensive and riskier, adaptive strategies within eco-systems. Obviously, animals causally interact with their environments, and, in that sense, they change their environments. But animals do not change entire eco-systems. (Only humans are so destructive). Animal species evolve through finding eco-systemic niches to which they adapt, and only in a relatively few instances does that involve the emergence of any novel complexity, which would bring any qualitatively new “information” into (co-)evolutionary processes. But even then, such novelty would interact with eco-systemic constraints. That goes to what I meant when I said that not only do animals exist as a function of adaption to their environments, but they could be said to be that adaption, with all the organization, appendages, and emergent mental functionings that that would involve. The organization of the animal is not a means to the end of its survival, but rather the survival of organisms is the means by which the evolution of species, with all its differentiations, diversifications, and emergences, occurs. One should beware of importing the ghost of teleology back into the understanding of natural evolutionary processes.
But what I’m basically saying here is a good deal more radical than the initial point Clark was putatively making. I’m saying that there is no universal or completely generalizable, neutral, and self-consistent “stuff” to be called information. Outside of the physics of thermodynamics, in which information has a precise and measurable definition in terms of physical organization or structure, though subject to the general law of positive entropy and hence tending toward decay or loss of information, it’s difficult to define precisely what information is or would be. Living organisms are negentropic organizations, such that thermodynamic information increases rather than decays over time, and one could proffer a fictitious fourth law of thermodynamics that, since life can only emerge and evolve with other life, that is, that life feeds off of other life, recycling organic metabolic compounds and increasing the density and proability of their distribution, a biosphere can only emerge and evolve under long-run quasi-permanent conditions of thermodynamic disequilibrium. But beyond that gross generalization, information and just what it would be is devilishly difficult to pin down. What exactly is a strictly causal mechanism and what is an informational mechanism, involving the detection or transmission of information that brings about some sort of variable “decision” is difficult to differentiate. The same process, regarded in one aspect and with respect to one level, might be informational, and in another aspect and in relation to another level, might be strictly causal. (The genetic “code” is informational, but sets off and can be triggered by causal chemical interactions; the brain might informationally decide upon an action, which sets off a causal sequence of events. Causal mechanisms give rise to informational ones, and informational ones give rise to causal ones). I pointed out how claims about “adaptive fitness” could be little more than empty tautologies. So I pointed out the modal relation between the life-process of the organism and the selective features of the environment to which it adapts, matching the statistical regularities of the organism’s metabolism with the statistical regularities of environmental events or processes. Which relation precisely generates “information”. But then the definition of “information” becomes equally threatened with tautology: “information” would be that which allows for the pattern-matching between organism and environment, generated out of the very relation between the two. The only conclusion I could draw is that “information” is disparate and concerns a wide variety of differing “matters”, though all of them in some sense generated out of evolutionary processes. I certainly don’t want to turn natural evolution back in the direction of the old idealist Hegelian Geist, which generates its categories out of itself and thus teleologically generates, directs and grounds its own development. To the contrary, the generative processes of natural evolution are contingent, discontinuous, and disparate. (I’m not even going so far as to claim that God is a Bayesian). But I think that a certain “moral” is clear enough here: if one is going to attempt to explain causally mental phenomena neurophysiologically within an evolutionary framework, which I think realistic, then, were such an adequate explanation to be achieved, attaining the reality of the matter “in-itself”, it would not all boil down into some sort of flat-out non-modal truth conveyed in terms of some generalized neutral stuff called information. To the contrary, the modal connections between various phenomena and processes at various levels would be irreducible, because they are part and parcel of the real phenomena to be explained.
A few very brief comments. (I'm on vacation after all)
1. I think there is some equivocation going on over "sense of self." There's the sense of self in which we have at least some sense of self and then various developed senses of self. I think John is talking of the latter (and I think Paul Ricoeur has done the best work on this). Rich, I think you're talking of the former. But I think you'd agree that when we speak of a sense of self we can speak of it in different ways. My sense of self is almost certainly of a different sort than what my 10 mo old daughter has.
2. Regarding autism as a key to understanding development. It's interesting. The Tomasello book we did a group read on last year was all about this. The debate in this vein with Chomsky, Pinker and company is very interesting although it seems like it hasn't reached a finality yet. (i.e. it's still a very active debate) While I think autism can tell us a lot, I tend to think it gets overstated a bit - especially since we're still learning about autism. But I do tend to agree this is a very fruitful avenue of research and speculation.
3. I'm not quite sure how language inaugurates a break with the natural order. I don't think the natural order ever was determinate. It seems the idea of nature as determinate died decades ago. It surprises me that this idea still pops up in philosophy when science (as I see it) discarded it years ago with the double-whammy of the rise of Darwinism privileging chance in many folks mind and then the second blow of quantum mechanics overturning Newtonian determinism.
4. I agree that worlds, meaning, and knowledge all obtain only in a social-linguistic setting. However since that ends up being the very point in dispute I'm not sure one can hammer one's opponents with this point. The debate is ultimately why one should choose externalism over internalism. As Rich notes, internalism is the de facto stance in neurology and psychology at the moment. Even in philosophy it is still the dominant position.
5. I'd repeat my request, Rich, that you perhaps outline what you mean by input and output. Like John I'm reading you in terms of information processing but unlike John my suspicion is that this is an incorrect reading.
To add. While I am actually, because of my semiotics background, very sympathetic to thinking in terms of information processing, I agree with John that there are some odd ontological questions here. i.e. what is information?
This is something I've been grappling with over the years, primarily via an engagement of Derrida and Peirce with each other with me as the mediator. I'll not bore you with that discussion. I'll just say that Peirce attempts to adopt a kind of quasi-idealism that avoids the problem John raises. I'm not sure in the least he is successful in this. At best we might say that information happens but that the happening can't really be grounded in terms of either immaterial stuff (ala meanings as entities) or as grounded purely as material states (i.e. the traditional materialist approach).
Derrida's approach which ends up being an impossibility that is simultaneously necessary and obviously occurring seems a bit of an artful dodge.
So I think there are some very foundational ontological issues here that unfortunately probably can't be adequately solved yet which are key to understanding mind.
John, I simply cannot respond to a seven page (MS Word) dissertation. If you could be more concise I would love to continue the discussion. Perhaps put it into bullet form as does Clark.
To help, I agree that evolutionary process goes a long ways towards explaining how we got to where we are. I think aspects of Darwinian evolution must be modifed or changed. Just now we are realizing that the DNA can be changed from the outside, that is outside the DNA. Therefore not all DNA changes reflect mutation. Also Darwinian evoltion has a hard time explaining complex organs. But on the whole I think evolution explains the variety of life. So I think at some general level we agree.
Rich
Rich, I think our agreements by far outweigh our disagreements. I think the fundamental disagreement is over externalism vs. internalism and what ought count as input or output and what is neither but affects or is affected by the brain.
Rich Knapton:
Apologies for my prolixity. I’m never sure on the internet whether I’ve adequately articulated my point or points, and so am never sure, when I feel I’m being misread or misunderstood, whether that’s the fault of my failure to coherently articulate what I think, or whether that’s a result of being read from a differing or conflicting point-of-view. Also, I tend to bite off a chunk at a time, and then try and explicate the connections between points and round them off into some sense of “completeness”, which always inevitably fails to be achieved in any complex matter. It also takes me some time and effort to gather together and organize my thoughts on a matter, and if I lose track of a part of a point, I’m liable to circle back and tuck it in later. That last 6 1/3 pg. of MS Word was in response to your response to my previous 6 pg. of MS Word, and my puzzlement as to how the points you “boiled down” quite came out of my previous effort. I was trying to respond to what you’d said, without being sure just how I had occasioned it and thus what was at issue, thus being tempted to try and hammer down some points that I felt were missed or misaddressed. So I will try and reprise some numbered points from the foregoing, hopefully without to much detail, to highlight something of what might be at issue here.
1) Most basically, I am taking issue with, refusing, and criticizing the thesis of mind/brain identify, such that “mind” must be reducible to causal brain processes, or must operate somehow in strict parallelism with brain processes. This thesis or assumption is widespread in discussions of the issue, often being implicitly held by otherwise quite opposed standpoints. Partly for this reason, I was insisting on breaking down “mind” and distinguishing between various mental phenomena and various levels. Hence, on the one hand, I was pointing out those aspects of “mind” and mindedness that belong to the socio-cultural level instituted by language and meaning, (which, though processed and supported by brains, are not reducible to an intra-cranial phenomenon, and require a different, re-oriented discussion, which no longer concerns solely strictly causal issues). On the other hand, I was pointing back to the fundamental intrication of brains with bodies and the intrication of mental properties and capacities with the physiological and behavioral in the context of organisms in their environments, as basic to attempting to understand and explain the causal generation of the mental and how it might “work” and to what effect.
1B) I do take fully self-conscious first-person mental experience as partly being formed on the socio-cultural level through the communication and understanding with others that language renders possible. So I would oppose the view that the first-person standpoint of mental experience is sheerly given, “primitive” and irreducible, and that it is some sort of “ultimate” at which all explanation must aim. I think that the first-person standpoint is composit, that it is an ongoing development, that there are issues of meaning and social reality beyond the first-person standpoint, in which the latter is merely participant, and that many aspects of the mental and our mental functioning actually escape the perspective of the strictly first-person awareness of the mental. But none of that is exactly relevant here. Rather the point is to dissolve the first-person standpoint, inspite of our inevitable involvement with it, to get at the issues of the pre-personal functioning of the mental and its causal basis. The way in which the first-person perspective is at once partly constituted by and also transcended by the socio-cultural merely serves to indicate the standpoint by which we can accomplish the latter.
1C) The decomposition of mental phenomena and the separation out of the issue of the socio-cultural dimension involved also serves,- “strategically”,- to separate out the specific issue we’re concerned with here, namely, the causal basis or substrate of mental phenomena and their generation in brain processes, from other philosophical issues to which that issue is often tied, such as meaning, agency or “free will”, the nature of knowledge and its justification, the “ultimate” nature of mind, or, most preposterously, what the “ultimate” nature of “mind” means for the ultimate nature of the universe. Through avoiding such tie-ins, as much as possible, to such other issues, we hopefully can avoid getting tied up into systematic knots, and having to resolve or cut through such knots. And so I’m only concerned here with primary-perceptual consciousness, not socialized self-consciousness, as the issue relevant for causal explanation. (Also, of course, subordinate or lesser forms of mental functioning that might never even enter directly into the formation of conscious states).
2) So one of my main difficulties with what I can construe of the views that you are presenting is the way that you seem to present the brain as a separate, “autonomous”, and internal “reality” unto itself, abstracted from the surrounding realities and its relations to those realities, from which it emerges, and in the midst of which it occurs. On the one hand, from my point-of-view, such an abstracted view of the brain as autonomous and internal obstructs the possibility of adequate causal explanation by blocking off causally relevant ingredients for a possible explanation in terms of the evolutionary emergence and current functioning of brain processes. On the other hand, from my point-of-view, diagnostically, such an account of the brain as autonomous and internal results from an hypostatis of fully self-conscious first-person mental experience and an attempt to read back such an account into its causal antecedents, such that the explanandum effects the explanans, with some degree of “vicious” circularity. What’s especially striking to me in your account is its double-take on the issue of the “necessary” embodiment of brains, with that residue of brain-in-a-vat. There’s no dispute with me about the importance of neural mappings, (though that’s not the only important mechanism by which brain-processing functions), but what’s odd to me is how you don’t seems to realize that neural mapping of the body-plan and its functions doesn’t separate the brain from the body, but, in both evolutionary and current terms, is precisely a prime instance of how brain and body interact and of how the brain is “rooted” in the body. And the brain is “rooted” in the body precisely because the brain emerges from the “necessity” of mediating the body’s metabolic needs and drives with environmental conditions, which is why the two need to be considered in terms of their interaction with the environment. That’s why, in my last comment-post, I tried to hammer home variously, in terms of the evolutionary emergence of brains, the fundamental “rootedness” of the brain in its embodiment.
3) I’m not sure how much of our putative disagreements are a matter of vocabulary and how much a matter of conceptual differences,- or of different spins or distortions of the “same” concepts. I use “world” to refer to an environing aroundness of more-or-less structured meaning horizons through which “things” appear more-or-less as they are, which structure only pertains to humans and their experience, since only they have or bear natural language. If you’d want to refer to the perceptual field of an animal as its “world”, O.K., but you’re actually referring to its relation to its environment. (Animals can’t “step out” of their “experiences” in the way that we can). If you insist that animals “create” their perceptions, well, I understand the point that the specific features of perceptual qualia are generated through brain processes, but they do perceive something, and it’s only the categorization of that something that’s specific to the brain-and-organism, and the “value-weighting” of that categorization has as much to do with the organization of the body, its “equipment”, and its needs (in interacting with the environment) as with the organization of brain processes. I can escape the suspicion that some of your usages express a temptation toward backwards teleology.
4) I don’t disagree with your expressed view about affective imprinting of episodic “mental’ experiences. In fact, I don’t think that the “mental” should be flat-out identified with the cognitive and that the emergent evolution of the “mental” directly results from “cognitive” adaption. The view I tried to express, though, is that selective value-weighting for salience is widely operative in the whole organization of brain processes, and that the “values” that weight for salience are deeply intricated with bodily needs and capacities. Affective imprinting would be a specific case of a more general instance. Viewed as a particular local mechanism, “value-weighting” would occur as the local saturation or dosaging of specific neurochemicals in a specific area of neural processing. If a particular skill, for example, were being acquired through practicing, successful repetitions would be re-enforced through the release of dopamine (?) in the relevant neural groups until the skill was adequately acquired, after which no further dosings would occur. But my point is that such specific chemical mechanisms occur widely throughout the organization of neural processing and are widely ramified in it. The perceptual categorizations that comprise the features of qualia are just as much weighted for salience, in their evolutionary emergence and, in at least more complex mentalities, in ongoing neural experience and learning, as are specifically traumatic or rewarding instances of episodic experience that occur through such perceptual categorizations.
5) I’m taking a fairly radical view, far beyond my very limited empirical knowledge of these matters, but, what’s more, far beyond the definitive sum total of empirical knowledge that would be currently achieved and available. I’m placing my bets and taking my chances. Of course, I recognize that brain processes produce integrations and operate coherently overall, to the point where they can be considered “global”, depending on stages of evolutionary emergence and differences between species, with only a relatively few attaining more-or-less complex and differentiated neurally-embedded consciousness systems. But I am claiming that all that does not result from any centered and hierarchical structure, coordinating the whole business. Rather the overall coherence itself results from highly distributed processes that themselves operate selectively in terms of competitive equilibia. In other words, brains do not just emerge through and result from Darwinian selectionist processes, but they themselves are organized largely through selectionist mechanisms, analogous to the Darwinian selection from which they have resulted. And consciousness is much more the emergent result than the controlling center of neural processes, the “tip of the iceberg” of the whole “global” process. That it maintains coherence to the extent that it does, is a finely poised balance, more of a lucky accident than an inevitable goal.
6) Clark asked if you could clarify or expand upon what you mean by “input” and “output”. I’d second that request, and have been trying to point out just how hard that is to specify and how problematic the distinction is. Clark speaks in terms of internalism and externalism, which is a label from Analytic philosophy. I think I understand what he means when he discusses his own views and those of his favorite philosophers, but I have some trouble with those labels, not just because Analytic philosophy is not my favorite happy hunting grounds,- (I’m pretty nomadic). Part of the problem is that internalism and externalism vary as labels for positions depending on the topic under consideration. One could be, for example, an internalist about mind, but an externalist about knowledge, or an internalist about knowledge, but an externalist about ethics (Kant?). So it doesn’t do to distinguish the intrications and cross-implications of various positions. And, of course, I’m not sure that the views that I would be inclined to would be allowed under the rules of the game: I’d guess my standpoint could be labeled “second-person externalism”, and that might be a no-no. But the other problem is the way it tends to set up internal and external as an opposition, when it might better be viewed as a boundary. A boundary permits traffic across, to and fro, such that there can be “internalizations” and “externalizations”. Such a boundary is precisely definitive for the existence of organisms. The boundary between an organism and its environment implicates at once the separateness of the organism and its “necessary” interaction with its environment.
6B) I also asked you to clarify what you meant by neural “encoding”. I don’t know if you grasped what I said above about brains being analog processors and the reasons I gave for thinking so. But that would imply no coding medium would be needed or even possible. I realize “encoding” is used as a piece of jargon in various discourses from various disciplines in “neuroscience”. But what does it mean? Is it a place-holder for je-ne-sais-quoi? Is it a metaphor? Is it intended as a description for an actual empirical mechanism? Is it an effect of formal modelling, which is projected on the empirical matter itself? (Features of formal models are often “encoded” in terms of other features of the model; Goedel numbers are encoded as sentences in Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem, for example). Is a neural memory being layed down in and by the brain an encoding, (as opposed to just a formation or strengthening of synaptic connections at the relevant site)? Is an encoding when two neural systems or functions are cross-referenced, as when a memory layed down is affectively imprinted as traumatic or rewarding? So could you expand upon that issue of encoding and how you’d think it would work?
7) I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to with respect to a revison of Darwinian explanation or any external effects on genes. I’m not one who thinks that genes are a master blue-print for an organism and determine everything else about it. That’s a very bad metaphor. Dawkins in his pop writings, loosely read, tends to leave such an impression, but, aside from the fact that I’m not a fan of his, in his technical work, he was concerned with competitive conflicts between genes and between genes and their host organisms, which is a real issue, but one that subsequent evidence seems to indicate is of lesser scope and relevance than he made it out to be in his hay day. Perhaps you were referencing the “Baldwin effect” whereby non-genetic learning in populations could determine a selective effect that only later would come to be genetically re-enforced. At any rate, the latest trends in evolutionary-genetic theory emphasize quite subtle changes that effect gene-regulation cycles and variations in gene-expression rather than the traditional account of random point mutations in genes correlated to single phenotypic traits. When changes in gene-regulation cycles occur in genes regulating embryological development, very slight changes can have very large effects on the “final” form of the developed adult organism. And, needless to say, gene-regulation cycles and variable gene-expression are operative in every cell, including neurons, on an ongoing basis, such that they are involved in all the infinite intricacies of metabolism. I couldn’t even begin to guess at just how they might be subject to evolutionary refinement. But it’s not a matter of changing broadly Darwinian theory to suit our needs and problems, but rather of further discoveries effecting the evolution of Darwinian theory to the point where it might become adequate to addressing some of those problems.
Well, I don’t know if 4 1/2 further pages in numbered paragraphs recapitulating the prior 12+ pages helps, but you can’t blame me for not trying, only for being very trying.
And now, by popular demand. Inputs and Outputs:
First let me change my terminology from ‘brain’ to ‘mind/brain’. I don’t think the two are the same but they do work in concert. Inputs are the sense data our sense send to the mind/brain. They are the raw data from which we come to know the external. They consist of electrical and chemical process from neuron to neuron to the brain. They are reconstructed as sensory images within the separate sensory cortexes. This separate images are integrated into a whole within the rhinal cortex. The images then go to the hippocampus where they are placed with a spatial context. For long term memory the event is then passed to a portion of the brain which is responsible assigning neural locations for these memories. I forget the name but a metaphor (as long as it is not take too far) would be the directory on a hard drive. It is responsible for laying down long-term memory, through out portions of the brain and retrieval of that memory. The distribution of this event probably ends with changes within the synaptic gap at the dendiatic spine.
So what is input? I would say there are layers of input. Sensory data is obviously input. Organizing the data into sensory mental images would be input as would combining them and placing them within a spatial context. While this is going on our “directory” is recalling memory in order to place the event within a previously established affective meaning (significance). (If it is a new event then the affective significance, in terms of survival, is imprinted on the event prior to being laid down as long-term memory.) All this would be considered input. If no immediate action is needed then the event would process into long-term memory (if it is that significant) for future reference.
What about output? This seems to be a combination of genetic predisposition and learned behavior. Most of our survival behavior (our behavior at its core is survival behavior) is a variation on two themes: fight or flight. We seem to be genetically predisposed to one or the other but it is not an absolute. As children in a loving stable home we learn good coping skills. This skills become the basis of future coping skills and are in our memory through affective processing (dual processing). If we do not come from loving stable homes, we still learn coping skills but ones that in later life become quite dysfunctional.
As we experience life we develop quite a number of coping skills. They are like sub-routines that are selected on the basis of the type of affective event we encounter. Thus we encounter a particular event and based on the affective significance of the event an ‘appropriate’ response is selected and that sub-routine is enacted. For the most part we are little aware of the behavioral sub-routines we run once an affective event triggers a particular behavior. We can, however, train ourselves to look at cause and effect. I think but am not sure that this must be done in the third person. Thus we can change the sub-routines but it is difficult.
This then is input and output. We begin with sense data which the brain processes in the sensory cortexes and creates a mental image. Memory is used to bring up similar events and the affective signification of the earlier events is transferred to the new event. If it is a new event, its affective significance is encoded on the event prior to entering the hypocampus. They are then encoded in memory along with their affective significance. Depending on the significance of the event certain behavioral sub-routines are put into action. All of this, the event, the memory, and behavioral sub-routines are all cross-referenced based on affectivity.
All of this sounds like the modularity of Chomsky and Pinker but it is not. As I said earlier, we have certain modules such as the various sensory cortexes, for the most part these other sections of the brain act like processing centers rather than individual modules. The difference is that these centers have extensive connections throughout the brain. There is reciprocal information flowing back and forth among these different processing centers. All of this effects how each processing centers works. They are not in self-contained modules.
Again, let me reiterate, this is first person input and output. It operates below the symbolic level. That is, the processes and the results of the processes cannot be made aware to the I. The events themselves may or may not be accessed through symbols but the processing cannot. Behavior is explained by first person inputs and outputs.
The Heideggerian (sp?) approach that both you Clark and you John seem to favor are what I call third person inputs and functions. They do not trigger behavior (only affections can do that) but they may influence how the behavior is expressed. These are the socio-cultural concepts that has been spoken of. They even reside in a different part of the brain.
Rich
With regards to #2.
You keep insisting that I view the brain as an autonomous entity. I don’t. If I described the liver in terms of the input and output processes the liver performs, I’m not declaring the liver as autonomous. I’m simply describing the processes only the liver can perform. It is the same with the brain. I’m simply describing processes which can only be done within the brain. I do not assert the independence of the brain. There is NO ‘brain-in-the-vat’.
With regards to #1.
I assert that man has two methods of interacting with the environment. If this isn’t grasped then none of what I say makes sense. Most of western philosophy asserts that man interacts with the environment through only one method: rationality. This has been the general approach of cognitive science also, up until recently. This can be summed as “man is a rational animal.”
I know longer accept that view. I now see that we interact with the environment in the first person perspective and the third person perspective. I’m not talking about me in the world, me out of the world, or me vs. the world. ‘Me’ may or may not be a single entity but that entity interacts with the world in two different ways based on whether the interaction is personally survivor significant or not.
All animals interact with the world on a personally significant level. It’s called survival. There is a reason for that. Animal brains are constructed basically the same, including humans. This why scientists can work on the brains of rats and have it significant for humans. Most of the processing done is in parallel processing. There maybe some linearly processing done with hearing but for the most part it accomplishes it job through parallel processing. As I said, this part of the brain we share with all other animals. This part of the brain interacts with the environment on the level of what is personally significant as defined by affection. This is our first person perspective.
We have another perspective by which we interact with the environment. It is our third person perspective and it processes information serially: language and logic. It is unique to humans and it allows us to investigate the environment as environment (no personal survival significance involved). This is what science does. This is where an aspect of language resides: syntax. It may not all reside in one portion of the brain but it requires serial processing in order to work.
Somewhere along the line, after we split off from the primogenitor of us and the grate apes, humans developed an increase in serial capacity. This increase allowed to develop capacities no other animals has: logic (mathematics) and syntax. Neither is required for survival. The great apes do fine without them. Nor can a social evironment account for it. All social animals have some kind communication system by which individual members of a society can interact with other members. The great apes have an extensive array of tools used for social communication: words, facial expressions, inflection,, body language, gesturing. By words I mean different vocalizations for specific concepts.
It would seem the only thing that separates our communication and that of the great apes is the introduction of syntax. But it allows us to expand our conceptualizations such that the third person perspective developed. Without syntax no third person perspective could exist. We would remain in a first person perspective such as the great apes. Information acquired through third person perspective is not even stored where events with a first person perspective are stored.
Socio-cultural information is third person information. It is information which, by itself, has no power to induce behavior. What it does, though, is have the power to help place affectively induced behavior within socio-culturally acceptable parameters. It will not induce anger, but it will guide how that anger is expressed. This part of the brain is called semantic memory. It is responsible for the way we understand words, meanings and concepts. It is located in the anterior temporal lobe. While episodic memory (personally significant memory) and semantic memory are separate memory systems, recall links the two together.
With regards to #3
John: If you’d want to refer to the perceptual field of an animal as its “world”, O.K., but you’re actually referring to its relation to its environment.
Animals perceive their world, obviously. But they also create significance, which triggers specific behaviors. Significant events (based on affectation) are retained in memory for future use. While a bit limited, this is basically the first person perspective. All animals have it including man. The difference is animals like dogs live in the moment. And, they have no third person perspective.
Not only that but animals have neural correlates of abstracts concepts. Scientists have found such a correlate for an abstract concept of nests in mice. Neural correlates for abstract concepts such as buildings, people, trees, animals have been found in monkeys. Humans have, among others, a neural correlate for faces. No matter what face we think about it is in this area we think about it. Evidently what happens is that certain neurons in this area fire in response to certain patterns of faces. Some of these and some other neurons in this area fire in regards to other face patterns. One of the major philosophical questions, that of universals, turns out be a facility both man and animals have of automatically generating abstract concepts.
With regards to #4
John: The view I tried to express, though, is that selective value-weighting for salience is widely operative in the whole organization of brain processes.
But you may have missed the significance of affection. Affection is how all animals process survival significance. Like Dr. Greenspan explained, affection allows animals to process and organize experiences in a fashion which provides extremely fast recall. As an animal, man also processes experiences in this manner.
With regards to #5
The liver is an organ in the animal bodies. It performs a number of functions: production of bile, which helps carry away waste and break down fats in the small intestine during digestion; production of certain proteins for blood plasma; production of cholesterol and special proteins to help carry fats through the body; conversion of excess glucose into glycogen for storage (This glycogen can later be converted back to glucose for energy); regulation of blood levels of amino acids, which form the building blocks of proteins; processing of hemoglobin for use of its iron content (The liver stores iron); conversion of poisonous ammonia to urea (Urea is one of the end products of protein metabolism that is excreted in the urine); clearing the blood of drugs and other poisonous substances; regulating blood clotting; resisting infections by producing immune factors and removing bacteria from the blood stream.
The liver performs these functions for the purpose of helping to insure survivability of the entity. It has its own structure by which these purposes are performed. The brain is simply another organ in the body. It has its own structure and processes but it also share the same purpose as the liver: helping to insure the survivability of the entity. It is how we process personally significant events and how ‘appropriate’ behavior is selected. We share this with all animals.
We do have one ability that animals don’t have. We have the ability to step outside our relationship with the environment. This is the third person perspective. It allows us, among other thing, to modify how we express our behavior.
With regards to #6 B
Neural coding is represented by a physical process which includes action potential, neuro-transmitters. The brain has 100 billion neurons. Each neuron can produce 1,000 calculations per second. There are 60 trillion synapses in the cerebral cortex alone. Each synapse, on the receiving side, ends on a dentritic spine. The size and shape of each spine changes and indicates a spot of information. I compare it somewhat to pointillism where it is not the individual spine which contains the information but rather the information is spread over hundreds or thousands or more of these points of spines. Collectively they supply the information.
It is theorized by some that neurons are generally firing randomly. A new event requires certain neurons (how many? I have no idea), out of all the neurons who are firing randomly, to fire in a pattern. When affective information is added, I would assume, but don’t know, by additional neurons, with their information, being added to the pattern. In the hippocampus, additional neurons are added to the pattern to proved spatial information to the event. It is believed that long term information is passed to the anterior prefrontal cortex where it is distributed across memory sites within the brain.
In recall, the anterior PFC is also involved with recall. Evidently episodic memory and semantic memory are integrated in the aPFC. This would be the place where affectively generated behavior and social information (semantic data) could be integrated whereby social concepts could modify behavior. However, if the behavior is too strongly affectively motivated it could override the semantic data and be expressed in a socially unacceptable manner.
With regards to #7.
The are quite a few people who believe that evolutionary change begins with random mutations within the DNA sequencing. I was simply trying to point out that we are now learning that not all changes in DNA sequencing is caused by random mutations.
Rich
Rich Knapton:
One of the problems of the account you are offering is that it is entirely focused on the episodic event and the corresponding instance of neural/mental processing. For example, you are saying that incoming sensory inputs are being matched with prior memories, which is roughly right, but it doesn’t happen that way at each instant ab ovo. Rather there must be a prior “grid” of neural categorical memory, for perceptual “inputs” to be registered as perceptions. Perception is not just a matter of registering sensory “inputs”; aside from the fact that such sensory “information” must be organized and “analyzed” by neural processes from the raw stimulations of the variously arranged nerves in the bodily sense-reception organs, perception requires categorical identification. For example, you do not perceive a loud, red, metallic blur rushing past you; you perceive a fire engine racing down the street to a presumed fire. It’s only when the categorical identification is applied to already organized sensory “inputs” that the mental “act” of perception occurs. Which is to say that even if there is no neurally embedded consciousness system in an organism, perception as a mental event requires both a categorical memory embedded in the brain and an organization of raw inputs into a form useable for that organism in terms of perception. (A phototropic reaction of a single-cell organism might be an instance of a response to “information”, but it is not an instance of perception. That is what I was pointing to above in saying that perception is perhaps the most primitive instance of something sheerly “mental”. Note that perception occurs in organisms long before, on an evolutionary scale, they are integrated into some sort of primitive neurally embedded consciousness system). But regardless of whether the neural organization of sensory inputs is “mental” or not,- (I think that’s a gradient),- the matching of neurally organized sensory inputs to prior categorical memories is required for there to be something that we could identify as “mental”, and that must be at least a minimally organized stable relationship within a “system” to be functional at all. And, of course, the organization of sensory organs and of their neural inputs and the organization of “mental” processes co-evolve together. And that coevolution occurs in interaction with an environment. Which is to say that, given the evolved “level” of a given species of organism, of all the myriad environmental events that might occur, most are screened out by the nature of the organism and those that are relevant to its functioning are effectively selected for processing by that nature. Which is not to say that all those extraneous environmental events are irrelevant to the survival probabilities of the organism. To the contrary, some of those extraneous events might amount to sequences by which the organism in question gets eaten by a predator, but, if that’s not part of the “mental” equipment of that organism, so be it.
The upshot here is how fundamental neural memory is to the being of anything “mental”. Indeed, there would be numerous types of neural memory, “located”, if that is quite the right word, throughout the brain, some of which wouldn’t concern any specifically mental, let alone conscious or experiential, function at all, but all of which underpin the possibility of any sort of mental organization whatsoever. It is through being fed through the “grid” of more-or-less organized memory that events can be “tagged” and categorized at all, so as to become emergently “mental”, whether cognitively or affectively construed, and become relevant for behavior. And, needless to say, those causal processes that generate a mental “experience” of any sort logically are themselves not accessible to the experience that they generate and constitute. Even our explicit conscious memory, which is the sort that you are addressing in terms of the routing through the hippocampus, is scarcely under our conscious and voluntary control, as trying to remember something on an occasion in which one seems to have forgotten something crucially relevant attests, which is also why we make conscious efforts to memorize matters to increase the chances of their availability, (only to forget them long after the exam). (Indeed, so fundamental is memory, that we as persons could be said to largely be our memories). Now a couple of points about neural memory should be emphasized. One is that neural memory is a system property, not an atomic bit of “information”, which is to say that, as new memories are added to those already “stored” in neural memory, the older memories are changed thereby, as a change in the system. That would be why the analogy with a computer disk drive is inapropriate and misleading. Neural memories are not like photographic records reproducing past events and they are not assigned specific addresses from which they can be retrieved/recalled, but rather are stored and accessed through an associative nexus of neural pathways, which link variously with other memories. The other point is that neural memory, of whatever kind or degree, already constitutes a kind of “virtual reality”, in which real events get mixed and recombined, to potentially generate, however marginally, an altered reality as “output”. This links up with what you had to say about “sensory images”, (which I take it you do not mean to imply are strictly visual, though the olfactory part of the brain in primates is considerably shrunken, compared to many other mammals, and there does seem to have been an evolutionary shifting toward a certain primacy of visual processing there). In the first place, such “images” would be produced through the matching of neural categorical memory of which I spoke, (and, for the above stated reason, those neural categories and that matching process would not, as producing the image/event, be in any way “experienced”, let alone conscious). Secondly, the perceptual event, whether or not it occurs within the integration of the perceptual field effected by a neurally embedded consciousness system, or disparately in an organism that has not yet evolved such a system, does not involve a “sensory image”, but involves the perception of the “thing” itself, however that is organized by the sense organs and subsequent neural processing of their “inputs”. Again, the matching with neural categories is the event of perception, in which ongoing “inputs” are filtered and constituted as what you would take to be “sensory images”, which could actually arise only in subsequent recall and comparison. (In other words, you’re attempting to imagine animal neural experience, and thus projecting the human “experience” of imagination with its shadowy images back into that neural process).
Primary perceptual consciousness as a neural system, as I’ve already purposed here before, involves the simultaneous integration of the senses, with their variously organized “inputs” into a kind of simultaneous screen of representation of the environment/perceptual field through connecting it up with a value-weighted neural categorical memory: consciousness is a “remembered present”, which is what gives us the sense that it is a representation of reality, (since it is literally a re-presenting of current ‘inputs” in terms of past experience), leading to the temptation to the conceptual faux-pas that it perceives images rather than the “things” themselves. But it is the organization of those “things” though the entire organic life-process of the organism in its interaction with its environment that ultimately generates, with whatever degree of adequacy, those “representations”. The first primitive consciousness systems would have evolved somewhere up the evolutionary scale of terrestrial chordates. (I would presume, small brains aside, that the aquatic environment of fishes neither requires, nor enables consciousness systems). My basic conjecture is that the generalized selection advantage of the possession of consciousness would be that it permits a much more efficient integration of perception and motility, orienting the animal in its environment, such that, for example, a predator with consciousness would be much more proficient than its analog without consciousness, and prey species would tend to evolve consciousness systems, to the extent that they do, out of the coevolutionary “arms race” with predators. But the most important point to grasp here is that consciousness is not identical to the mental tout court, but rather that there are many other components to the mental, many of which might not enter into conscious states, though they might condition and contribute to them, and some of which might never enter into any sort of experience or awareness. Much more is going on in the generation and disposition of conscious states than is or can be ever experienced, and much of that could be construed as properly “mental” phenomena, though, again interacting with the physiological and behavioral, and thus mediately with the environment. Treating of the mental solely in terms of its thematic “intentional contents” is bound to become short-circuited somewhere along the line.
That’s part of the point of decomposing the notion of “mind” into various mental phenomena and their distinctive properties and capacities, and taking the long step back into an evolutionary perspective. It’s a matter of attempting to “see” and think about a bit more clearly the components of the mental, how they emerge and connect to form integrations and coherences and even eventually “global” processing as a virtual “whole”, and what effects that would have. But I would propose somewhat speculatively this highly generalized thesis: mental phenomena, of whatever kind or level, are involved with endowing the organism with an increased capacity to respond behaviorally to contingent and unforeseen events. As an empirical example, human brains, in their auditory processing,- (that would be in the temporal lobe and maybe the frontal),- have special neuronal groups, the task of which is to “make sense” of literally unheard of sounds. That might connect up with variably other processing “functions”, not just “things that go bump in the night”, but, say, attempting to understand someone speaking English with a heavy foreign accent, or attempting to follow highly dissonant music. (The famous riot at the world premier of “The Rite of Spring” has been purportedly explained by the overtaxing of these neuronal groups by the then unheard of percussiveness and dissonance of that piece of music, causing an excessive release of dopamine in the process, which literally drove the audience crazy. When the piece was performed again in Paris a year or two later, there was no riot, but great critical acclaim, making the man’s reputation “forever”). But the capacity to “make sense” of and novelly respond to contingent unforeseen events is always constrained not just by the limits of neural capacity, but, by the need, in such pattern-matching or recognition, to balance the novel phenomenon with the conservative need to maintain the stability and organization of the “whole” system , the pattern-maintenance by which it operates. The evolutionary emergence of primary perceptual consciousness and its further refinements in terms of complexity and differentiation in the evolution of “higher” animals would be signal instances of the increased capacity for behavioral responsiveness to contingent novelty. But that also suggests something of the limits and distinctive function of such consciousness within the overall emergent organization of the mental. At least going by the human experience of primary perceptual conscious, (since we have no direct access to any other), two features are noteworthy. One is that conscious states are extremely rich in “information”, such that vastly more “information” is available than can be focused upon. The other is that consciousness skips about highly variably such that neural processes might at one moment enter into the constitution of a conscious state and at another moment, while the processing still occurs, not be involved in a conscious state. In other words, consciousness, while ongoing, is also a highly intermittent phenomenon, interacting with and relying upon much other mental processing, which it does not control, but which rather generate and condition its states. As I said earlier, consciousness is just the “tip of the iceberg”, but that might well be its functional “point”. In interacting with the mental processes that generate and condition it, consciousness might be a focal selective mechanism directed toward whatever is most important, salient, or contingently unexpected or novel in the perceptual field, such that what it focally thematizes in the array of “information” that it comprises, interactively combines to select the pathway to the generation of the next conscious state, without exactly controlling that process. States of consciousness might form a connected and continuous series within an overall global processing, but constituted by that overall global processing rather than by consciousness unto itself, with the “unity” of that overall process, (including the interaction with the environment), with its reversions to prior states and different aspects or activities, constituted by the “problem” that consciousness focally selects to be “solved”.
But there is another matter here, concerning the evolutionary emergence and causal explanation of the mental, up to and including consciousness, that effects the internal/external and input/output distinctions and renders them problematic and ambiguous: the formation of concepts. I can’t exactly tell whether there is a residue of traditional empiricism in your thinking, whereby sensory perception is something passively registered from outside rather than an organized and directional process involving selective parameters, but I tend to be a bit “Kantian” in my thinking. Concepts here are defined primitively as any relation between to percepts that is not itself a percept. As such, they underlie the organization of the mental and the corresponding behavioral possibilities of the organism, long before the evolutionary emergence of consciousness, and, indeed, crucially underlie the emergence of consciousness systems and their structuring. The relation between percepts involved in concepts need not be “real”, only involving statistically significant regularities in environmental events and processes in relation to the statistical regularities of the organism’s metabolic life-process. (It is only at the human level, with the counterfactual stance rendered possible by language, that inquiry and testing can occur as to whether the links between percepts involved in concepts are causally real and efficacious and adequately conceived, or merely facticious). What counts is less that they would be cognitively “correct” than that they allow the organism a certain generalized control over its interactions with the environment. But, while mentality and especially consciousness can be seen as an “openness” toward the environment, what’s important to recognize is that “openness” is constituted by a prior “closure”, insofar as concepts structure the organism’s mental and behavioral interaction with and reception of environmental events and processes. Now concepts can be and mostly are innate, given through genetic inheritance and structured into the anatomical “wiring” of the nervous system, especially for species with little or no consciousness. With the evolution of more complex and differentiated consciousness systems, the possibility arises for concepts to be acquired through neural experience and learning, (together with their “external” correlate, behavioral patterns). But either way, they are structuring the interaction with the environment so as to selectively determine the relevant features that are neurally processed and constrain and impact the corresponding behaviors, so that, whether considered in terms of long-run evolutionary processes or the developmental history of a single organism, the internal/external, input/output relation is “reversible”, with external input selectively determining internal output, just as much as vice versa. I want to emphasize two points here. One is that, though I’ve emphasized the role of “adaptive fit”, I’m opposing strict adaptionist account of the mental, as if the mental were a matter of gaining ever clearer cognition of a purely objective environment and thereby, through gaining greater control over it, the mental directly evolves as a tool for adaption. Something roughly like that does occur up the evolutionary scale, but it occurs in a much more round-about way than such a strict adaptionist, cognitive-instrumentalist “picture” envisions, involving the bodily rooted and affectively and behaviorally conditioned organization of mental processes emerging prior to any consideration of the cognitively “functional”. The second point I want to make is that these considerations about the role of categories and concepts in the emergence of mental processes constitutes a second main reason why I think that brains are primarily analog pattern-recognition devices and not comparable to digital information-processing devices. In digital processing, strictly bounded categories and strictly defined concepts are required, such that something is classified either as identical or opposite and subject to a yes/no decision. As a result, boundary cases of something that is more-or-less similar and more-or-less different can not be decided as pre-defined and result in the freezing or crash of the processing system. But if the categories are framed as analog patterns, which way a boundary case is classified makes little difference, since the categories and concepts are themselves “defined” through the mix of cases and, whether in the long-run evolutionary perspective or in terms of the neural learning and experience in the development of an organism, categories and concepts can evolve, without needing to be defined as pregiven. Both these points, in my view, cut against formal/functional information-processing models of the mental in terms of informational input and output. I would underline especially that this is the case, if, in the light of the conception of consciousness as a contingently selective “problem solving” mechanism sketched in the previous paragraph, consciousness evolves the capacity through neural learning and experience to acquire concepts and possess, i.e. variably deploy, them, since that would amount to a change in the “information” at issue. (That would be a pre-symbolic, but semantic matter, with the acquisition of symbolic thinking greatly intensifying the matter, in interaction with the semantic capabilities of consciousness per se).
A word about “affect”. We need to distinguish the notion of affect in a highly generalized, somewhat technical sense, roughly as Spinoza uses the term, from affect in the ordinary narrow sense, synonymous with emotion. If you insist that only affect can trigger behavior, you’ve simply made that definitional. (I see no reason why a cognitive component might not set-off behavior, which term covers disparate matters, after all, such as exploratory behavior). But affect in the sense of emotion is a different matter, and, I think, should be distinguished from instinct, as a program of chained behaviors set-off by an environmental trigger-stimulus and outwardly directed. Emotions, by contrast, are “inward” reactions, and, I think, they emerge and evolve only with the evolutionary emergence of social species. Emotions would, according to my conjecture, be modes of reaction to social relationships and their (dis)equilibria. Hence such “affects” are not quite “internal”, nor “external”, but exist on a third “plane” of the social, wherein the two are mixed. Non-social animals might experience the analog of “fear” or “rage”, but they would not be capable of experiencing the analog of “anger” or “shame”. Your account of affects as imprinted through the limbic system, which, not coincidentally, is sometimes referred to as the “reptilian brain”, is not so much “wrong”, as far too narrow to encompass all the issues you might want to stuff into it. To interpret human experience from childhood forward in terms of “fight or flight” reactions is to figure the complex emotions of human relationships and affectional bonds in far too simplistic a key, determined by a single binary opposition. If, indeed, “fight or flight” reactions entirely determine a child’s experience and subsequent adult behaviors, then that would be evidence of either severe child abuse or organic “disease”. To be sure, humans need to learn to “cope” with all sorts of stresses, difficulties and dissatisfactions, and “good” parenting actually involves learning how to fail children “properly”, in successive stages, so that they can develop their own coping mechanisms. And later adult “dysfunctions”, such as, e.g., addictions, do often involve failed compensatory efforts for excessive affective ambivalences and distrust in human relations, though lesser ambivalence and distrust is part of any “normal” affective relationship and bonding, as witness, e.g., routine marital spats. And I do think that you are broadly right in noting how much of our ongoing behavior is “automatic” and not specifically a product of our conscious intentions or attentions, but rather conditioning the latter. But, again, taking a certain distance on the matter from the momentary instance might put that in better perspective. A lot of our behavior is acquired early through specific instances of conscious attention and effort and then later sunk into the “automaticity” of unconscious routine, in order to allow the development and integration of more sophisticated behaviors and skills. The example of playing the piano will do: a beginning student invests great conscious effort in mastering the physical mechanics of playing scales. A concert pianist scarcely thinks of physical mechanics, unless there’s a particularly difficult technical passage, but rather his/her consciousness is entirely absorbed in the flow and the anticipatory phrasing and intonation of the music, ( and probably the concert pianist could not tell you specifically, in terms of physical mechanics, how he/she achieves such effects). Yes, it is terribly difficult for us to change our habitual behaviors. That’s partly because our habitual behaviors are already, in one degree and way or another, a “success”, and partly because our habitual behaviors condition, while interacting with, our conscious intentions and attentions. I think the difficulty is less that of assuming a third-person perspective on our selves than the fact that our behaviors are already implicated with our needs, desires, and affects, and the difficulty of negotiating the latter and their implications in interaction with others. Coming to terms with the perspective I labeled “second-person externalism” is painfully difficult, insofar as we identify our selves with the maintenance of a fixed form or pattern, and fear and experience the anxiety of the consequences of its loss. That’s part of the reason why I would question the projection or imputation of survival as the conative “end” of animal organisms, rather than the mere “feeling” of being alive, whatever its quotient of pleasure or pain. When your dog chases after that stick or ball that you’ve thrown, the dog is exercizing its “God-given” capacities- and probably “experiencing” a “rush” of neuro-chemicals,- and the dog tires of the repetitive exercize less than you do.
The problem of “information”, that such a designation is disparate in kinds and mechanisms, such that any simple identification of inputs and outputs is unworkable, is not readily “solveable”, and I would have only crude and speculative suggestions about brain processes to meet the challenge. But that problem is, indeed, the main point of raising the evolutionary perspective on the mental, stripping the traditional philosophical and anthropomorphic prejudice in favor of the primacy and supremacy of “mind” of its obviousness and adopting a more distanced perspective, whereby emergent mental processes and functions can be “seen” in their situatedness and their hanging or belonging together with other other processes, beginning with their intrication with bodily metabolism, which is actually the “original” demarcation of the “internal” from the “external”, from which and “for” which the mental emerges as a mediation. The self-conceit of such traditional prejudices and the distortions they induce needs to be stripped away, not for moralizing reasons, but for epistemic ones, whatever the moralizing consequences may be. I hope to have at least shown here how problematic the distinction between external/input and internal/output is from such a perspective of gradual emergence. But the intrication of the problem of mental phenomena with their evolutionary emergence does not simply involve the matter of their adaptive fitness to eco-systemic niches, but explicates the problem in terms of the coevolution of ecosystems themselves. If there’s a basic rule of biological evolution, it’s “faster, cheaper and out-of-control”, with the constraints on such positive feed-back being provided by other exogenous, countervailing positive feed-back mechanisms, making for eco-systemic balances, such as the balances between populations of predators and prey species. It’s doubtful that beyond certain thresholds eco-systems themselves increase in the evolution of complexity. There’s that old joke of the famous biologist being asked by the society lady what evolution teaches us about the nature of our Divine Creator. Reply: “He has an enormous fondness for beetles”. The evolution of increased complexity, mentally or otherwise, is the exception that “proves” the rule: any “climbing” of the evolutionary scale of complexity among organisms is dependent on the maintenance of ecosystemic balances among simpler organisms that provide the resources for more complex, if unlikely, “development”. Situating the problem of “mind” in the evolutionary context of eco-systems suggests that the “information problem” applies just as much to figuring out eco-systems, such that the problem of “mind” might be just a subset of the problem of eco-systems.
Note: I didn’t see your last post until just now. I’ll read it and respond later.
Rich Knapton:
Some of the differences here are terminological. What you call a first-person survival perspective, I call pre-personal primary consciousness. I take “significance” to be synonymous with symbolic meaning, whereas you use the word for affective imprinting of episodic “information”. Also, I take the cultural level of symbolic meaning to be a second-person perspective, involving the recognition of the other as an entirely separate being, from which the third-person objective stance derives. There are no doubt conceptual differences involved in the different terms, but we aren’t a million miles apart.
Obviously, there are ways in which brains operate alike across species, which is part of the point of taking up an evolutionary perspective. But one of those ways is that each brain develops embryologically to fit its body, so, just as obviously, the brains of each species evolve and are organized differently in accordance with the differences between species. The evolutionary perspective is mainly a matter of gaining comparative insights into different organizations and levels of brain processes, whether explicitly mental or not. Yes, brains are organs, embryologically differentiated tissue masses with discrete anatomical location and structure, evolved to interact with other bodily organs and processes. But, on the other hand, no, brains are unlike livers, which have specialized functions concerned with the provision of nutrients and the elimination of metabolic wastes from the circulatory system, in that brains likely interact with many more physiological systems and come to evolve much more generalized “functionality”. But I’m the one who’s been insisting on the intrication and rootedness of brain function/organization in bodily physiological and metabolic processes and functions and the need to understand the evolution of mental phenomena in that light, even suggesting that the evolution of more complex physiology might be at the root of more complex central neural systems. Lung breathing, for example, might have provided an impetus to the further evolution of the brain stem; similarly, warm-bloodedness.
There’s another terminological knot between us concerning what you call “survival” and I call adaptive fitness. (Again, since I would use both “person” and “significance” differently, I don’t find you notion of affective imprinting with personal significance for survival exactly clarifying). I don’t go along with Dawkins’ hyperbole that organisms are just vehicles for the competitive transmission and survival of genes. But evolution “works” through recurrent causal cycles to “produce” adaptive fitness in organisms, in one degree or another, such that the probabilites of their survival to reproduce are enhanced, if not optimalized or maximalized, (which would imply a normative standard for measurement). “Survival”, then, is an outcome of the evolutionary process rather than an end and a relative by-product of adaptive fitness. And, though organisms do evolve responses to pain and danger in their environmental niches, and specific behaviors, as well as appendages and organs, by which they adapt to their niches, (partly by adapting those niches to their needs), such that, yes, they manifest in one degree or another, conation, with evolved instincts and drives deriving from their metabolic needs, and even, at “higher” levels of mentality, “intentional contents”, if animal organisms live in a specious present, they can not logically be said to project or aim at survival as their “end”. That global neural processing might conduce to that “end” does not contradict that point, since it too is an outcome, “imprinted” on organisms and species through the evolutionary process.
I think Clark expressed the nub of our tendential disagreements well: “I think the fundamental disagreement is over externalism vs. internalism and what ought to count as input or output and what is neither but affects or is affected by the brain.” The main point is that, though there are myriad events occurring all the time, to relevantly “exist” as an event, that event must be registered by something, (and , in effect, selected for registration by the prior organization of that something). If you stipulate an already organized organism-and-brain and an already defined environment and focus narrowly in a specific “function” , then it makes seeming sense to speak of the interaction in terms of “information” as “input”. But that does nothing to explain how that organization came to be as it is and how the relevant features of the environment came to be selected and how the organism-and-brain comes to “function” globally, to the extent that it does. If you step back to consider other narrow “functions”, then the “definition” of “information” and “input” differs and shifts with each such function, and to stipulate that the global “functionning” all boils down to “information processing” is just to argue by fiat and beg the question. This is why I was at pains to argue that, if the brain processes “information”,- and thereby in some sense solves the basic “information problem” that I specified and that we can’t quite ourselves solve conceptually, then the brain must in some way be co-generating the very “information” that it processes. And that co-generation, which I would resist calling anything like “creation”, involves situating the brain-with-its-body in interaction with its environment within an evolutionary perspective. So when you describe episodic experience and its storage in memory and its affective imprinting, I don’t think that you’re wrong; I just think you focusing on one specific “function” within a larger, more global processing. The counter-point that I made was that what I called “value-weighted selection for salience”, which involves specific mechanisms of chemical re-enforcements, is a much more widely distributed matter operating through out the “whole” of neural processing and its evolutionary emergent organization. I further made the point that memory is already operative, subtending the very processes and “function” that you are focusing on and conditioning it, such that it doesn’t need to be readily recalled, since it’s already “there” and operative, even as it never comes to explicit awareness. And I still think, diagnostically, that your account is subtlely blending first-person and third-person perspectives with something of the evolutionary/logical problem I discussed in the previous paragraph.
I did go into “concepts” in my last post-comment, partly because I read the Tomasello posts and I thought he was being rather tendentious in disparaging the conceptual, as well as, communicational/relational capacities of (some) animals in order to accentuate his own theses. I think that there is more continuity both in substance and in evolutionary stages between the human symbolic capacity for culture and animal mentality than he would seem to allow for, and, though I do emphasize a certain break between nature and culture, I don’t think that culture replaces and substitutes for biology, but rather interpenetrates with it. We’re in some agreement on the what you call the “neural correlates” of concepts, and I would only emphasize that initially “concepts” are a matter of the evolved, physically structured constraints of brain processes. I wouldn’t call such embodied concepts “abstract” though. Only when there is an evolved capacity for neural learning and experience, such that concepts can be acquired and deployed and semantical abilities develop in handling concepts could there be any question of abstraction, which involves the deployment of concepts to generate further concepts. That might occur pre-symbolically, but it’s already on the way to symbolic thinking. However, such conceptual and semantic abilities in evolved mentalities further compound the basic “information problem”.
The resort to an evolutionary perspective on “mind” serves as a critical check on the elaboration of philosophical theories about “mind”, though not as an entire substitute for the conceptual problems involved. I tend to view evolutionary theory as an “idea of reason” in Kant’s sense, though he could and would have no such notion, as at once a testing ground for critical insights and a source of “transcendental illusion” through the misapplication of concepts. At any rate, the evolutionary perspective is also crucially an eco-systemic perspective, and it is the latter which renders potentially intelligible the evolution of “higher” mentalities, without which one is left with an inscrutable paradox of how the “intentional content”, the aboutness of “mind” could possibly relate to a causal world. And, again, I think by loosening the connections to other philosophical problems, the “physicalist” problem of explaining the causal generation of mental phenomena is not really as formidable as philosophers often make it out to be, not only because of the step-wise approach and because one is no longer burdened with extraneous considerations and thereby tempted to make “mind” do all the work, but because one comes to realize that “intentional contents” is not all there is to “mind” or even to “intentional contents” themselves. If some animals evolve consciousness systems that on any reasonable construal involve “intentional contents”, even if they lack the syntactic and symbolic means for communicating such contents, then not only is it unsurprising that we too in our mental life are intricated with causal nexuses in continuity with animal forbearers without whom we would not be so endowed, but we can understand the significance of those contents in terms of the antecedents and follow-through of ongoing behavior and activity. 100 billion neuron is an immense number, and I really wouldn’t have any idea of the approximate number of synaptic conections: an “object” of more-than-astronomical complexity. But to me it suggests the “law of large numbers” and the stochastic selective processes that one might expect from an evolved system and its round-about ways. However, I wouldn’t want to leave any impression that I think it’s all just somehow a mysterious result of a cloud of neurons, without any anatomical, topological and “functional” organization and specification. I doubt that any true randomness, such as, e.g., Brownian motion, is involved in neural processing. And though massively simultaneous, “non-linear” processing is certainly crucially involved, “parallel processing” is a computer term of doubtful applicability: it’s more likely quite criss-cross. Also, consciousness does involve “serial processing” and linear sequencing of the “continutity” of successive states, well before syntactic/symbolic organization, although, as I tried to indicate in my last post, that might be a good deal more complicated than it might at first appear. I also have no idea what the claim that a neuron produces 1000 calculations per second could mean. Neurons are not micro-chips and do not of themselves “calculate”. If you mean that a neuron could potentially fire 1000 times per second that strikes me as on the high side but within the right temporal range. It has been estimated that a conscious state, involving no doubt hundreds of millions of neurons, requires a cycle of .15-.2 seconds to be organized or “synthesized”, which might imply that there might be 5 to 6 conscious states per second. Still, no matter how an evolutionary perspective on neural processing might help to unravel certain problems and difficulties and obviate false problems, it would seem that the more we come to know and understand neural processes, reversing Descartes, the more incredible it seems: a return of the ancient thaumazein.
I'm on my way home at a WiFi spot and have limited access. I'll do a more in depth read in a few days.
I'd just say that if input and output include all processes then that's fine. I don't see any disagreement then. The problem is when we label some processes as "mental" and others "non-mental" that I get queasy - simply because it seems all physical interactions with the brain are part of mental processes.
The reason the brain isn't like the liver is simply because the brain's function in terms of mind is quite unlike any other organ.
So I think what's going on is the very common approach of attempting to salvage as much of the Cartesian project as possible and talk in that way. This is so common that I don't think most people realize the philosophical history of the terminology or frameworks they use. (Some do of course - but it is the unconsidered assumptions I find problematic)
Take talk like "sense data." That makes a lot of sense in a Cartesian framework. (The remnants of which remained in empiricism as a foundational approach to mind, epistemology and metaphysics) However if one asks, "why talk this way?" there is little to answer beyond, "that's how we talk..." (OK, there are sophisticated arguments - but they're fairly inconclusive as philosophical debate tends to be) So if someone asked, "what's sense data?" in terms of the mind then we have a problem reconciling say electrical signals from the eye with a mental process of seeing. That is we often talk like the two are the same: the same sense data. But establishing this is much more difficult.
I don't mind the loose talk in most cases. (It happens in physics all the time as well - where most physicists switch between three completely incompatible ways of conceiving science quite frequently) However in some cases the loose talk conceals assumptions that can have significant effects on how one conducts and interprets ones experiments.
This is why I often praise Chomsky who is aware of these issues but is fairly careful to distinguish the issues when doing his science. (I typically disagree with Chomsky - but I really appreciate his understanding of the philosophical debate when he writes his science - his politics is an other matter)
Just to add. I agree that in a way externalism is a bad word since there are so many different kinds of externalism. Further the very dichotomy of internal and external still rests on a kind of Cartesianism. However typically if one is a strong anti-Cartesian that throws one into the externalist camp. (Broadly conceived)
Clark: So I think what's going on is the very common approach of attempting to salvage as much of the Cartesian project as possible and talk in that way.
Shortly after reading your reply I was reading “Fichte’s Intersubjective I” by Allen W. Wood of Stanford University and this line caught my attention: “John Searle and Daniel Dennett [anti-Cartisians], for instance, can find no more devastating attacks on each other’s philosophy of mind than by accusing each other of latent Cartesianism.” I thought the juxtaposition of those two quotes humorous.
On the question of the theory of mind, I find Descartes to be rather irrelevant. This is not from superciliousness. I think any attempt to discuss a theory of mind without a grounding in affection is headed in the wrong direction.
I think he would have been more on track had he said “I feel, therefore, I am.”
Rich
Note that Descartes has fairly little to do with Cartesianism as normally discussed now-a-days. And you are right that in philosophy the charge of Cartesianism is perhaps a tad too quick to be made. I think though that both Dennett and Searle have elements of Cartesianism in their thought and that each's charge against the other have a fair basis in reality. (Although I'll confess to not being as up on Dennett's charges against Searle - it's been just too long and I just don't enjoy reading Dennett that much typically)
I should perhaps do a post when I have time. (I just got back in town but are, as you might expect after a 1000 mile drive, a tad tired) I think going through the elements of Cartesianism in discussions of mind is quite helpful.
I would like that.
Rich
John, “Some of the differences here are terminological.” “There’s another terminological knot between us,…”
I don’t think our issues are terminologically grounded. I think they are grounded in our different perspectives on evolution.
John, “But evolution “works” through recurrent causal [environmental] cycles to “produce” adaptive fitness in organisms, in one degree or another, such that the probabilities of their survival to reproduce are enhanced, if not optimalized or maximalized,”
I studied this statement for a long time. This is not the typical Darwinian view of evolution. You have made evolution into a creative force rather than the standard gatekeeper role as found in Darwinian evolution: evolution ‘works’ through environmental cycles to ‘produce’ organisms with adaptive fitness such that this fitness insures the probability of their survival. Then it dawned on me. What you are talking about is complex adaptive system theory. Your thoughts also reflect self-organizing system and artificial neural network theories. I’m sure you bring you own perspective to these theories but these theories certainly do seem to ground much of your thought.
This highlights our difficulty. We are not even discussing the issue in the same evolutionary paradigm. Under the circumstances, it would be requisite of us to resolve the conflicts these two paradigms present or at least come to some common ground in which to discuss evolution and the brain. But this is probably not the best forum in which to do this. I certainly don’t want to high-jack Clark’s topic. Without that, further discussion would have us simply talking past each other.
Rich
Rich, while I agree with the thrust of your comments (although I'm far too sleep deprived to say too much more), I think that you're attributing too much to John. I think John's scare quotes were there to avoid giving Darwinian some quasi-Platonic creative force to it.
That may be Clark but John’s statement is classic cas (that’s how it is abbreviated in the literature). This is not a knock against John’s thoughts. Cas is a bright new tool used not only by AI people but also social scientists and evolutionary biologists. It is a mathematical attempt to model complex societies and how they adjust or adapt to the influx of new information. Evolutionary biologists are looking at it to investigate the nature of change within our biosphere. I’m not very familiar with it but I do know that it is becoming a new method by which to understand evolution. However it makes certain assumptions that are different from the assumptions of classical Darwinianism.
Rich
I think some see talk like this as talk of an emergent phenomena in evolution. That is just as reductionists still talk about mind, intents and so forth even though meaning something different philosophically by it, I think the same is true in evolution. And of course evolutionists have always used teleological language even if they reject the philosophy of teleology. (Although since the rise of ID folks are being much more careful in language)
Teleological aspects of biology are accepted by many biologists as unique and cannot be eliminated. They maintain these aspects depend on natural values that apply to biological entities (such as survival of the species). This is pretty much how I use such terms as function and design.
Rich
I think the question of teleology and biology is a complex one. While some biologists obviously do see some level of intentionality as intrinsic in all biology many do not. This is actually ultimately a big divide.
I think that philosophically naturalism (seen in this context as the reducibility of intentionality) does dominate science.
You’re probably right. For myself, I don’t have a problem with methodological naturalism. It’s approach is to say that it has nothing to say about knowledge (if there is such knowledge) which is unknowable through the scientific method. As opposed to philosophical naturalism which asserts no other knowledge exists.
It seems to me, two types of knowledge exist which are not amenable to the scientific method. The first is knowledge of one’s self, who I am, (as opposed to what I know) and the other is spiritual knowledge. Both are affectively based and therefore not susceptible to personal rational analysis. I would not say they are irrational rather they are non-rational.
Rich
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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