Last week I quoted from a 19th century article by Chauncey Wright, mentor of the Harvard-based Metaphysical Club, concerning the beginnings of self-consciousness in humans. He compared it with flight in birds. I'll try to elucidate. "The derivation of this power [self-consciousness], supposing it to have been observed by a finite angelic (not animal) intelligence, could not have been foreseen to be involved in the mental causes, on the conjunction of which it might, nevertheless, have been seen to depend. The angelic observation would have been a purely empirical one." The bracketing is mine, the parenthesis is Wright's. Our observing angel presumably is aware of mental activity in a range of animals -- stimulus is followed (often after some gap in time as if for deliberation) by response. Monkey sees some food out of reach. Monkey looks around, sees a long stick, uses it to extend his reach for the food. But then a particular "naked ape" appears who ha...
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Routledge has published a 14 essay collection of work b y some renowned neuroscientists. NEUROCOGNITIVE FOUNDATIONS OF MIND. https://www.routledge.com/Neurocognitive-Foundations-of-Mind/Piccinini/p/book/9781032602981 Consider that title. It is NOT saying that the mind simply IS the cognitive consequence of neurology. It is saying that there is genuine cognitive activity going on at different levels, and that the cognitive activity we recognize as ourselves is distinct from but dependent upon cognitive activity at a more primal level, neutral. The latter is, as the title sounds, foundational re the functioning mindful brain in its environment. Gualtiero Puccinini and colleagues call this an "integrationist" view as distinct from autonomism on the one hand and reductionism on the other. The mind can be neither reduced to nor is it autonomous from the body. The book appears to have begun as a conference at the University of Turin in ...
... what does Whitehead have to say about the emergence of consciousness and its place in a largely hostile cosmos? Still working my way through his masterpiece, Process and Reality. I'm looking especially at Part III (The Theory of Prehensions), Chapter III, "The Transmission of Feelings,' Section IV, where our man seems to be working this through in real time himself. "It is evident," he says, "that adversion and aversion ... only have importance in the case of high-grade organisms. They constitute the first step toward intellectual mentality, though in themselves they do not amount to consciousness." He uses the phrase "adversion and aversion" and sometimes "adversion or aversion" repeatedly, with "adversion" apparently meaning attraction and "aversion" meaning repulsion. The two words suggest reaction to lures, positive or negative. These "high-grade organisms" approach food and they avoid preda...
This spring I proudly announced on this blog that I believe I have achieved reflexive equilibrium on the issue of the relationship of the mind and the body. I am, I said, " an emergentist, and specifically one who embraces downward causation and a planetary mereology." I also tried at that time in the main text and in a brief exchange with Henry to explain what emergence means and why my mereology (my sense of parts and wholes) is planetary. For now I will just say that if we do discover life on other planets, I will think it perfectly moral to declare oneself an Earth Chauvinist. Today I would like to speak a bit about downward causation. If we think of reality as layered, so that matter was a layer added on to space and life a layer added on to matter, then one might well ask: are events in the upper layers explained fully by events in the lower? And are events in the lower explained fully by themselves? Can we explain all of biology as chemistry, and all ...
A sophisticated discussion of emergentism as a solution to the mind-body problem may be found in an article by Timothy O'Connor and Hong You Wong. It is called "The Metaphysics of Emergence" and it may be found at NOUS, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1990). Another important work on the subject, a little older, is that of Roger Sperry. "Mind-brain interaction: Mentalism, yes; dualism, no." NEUROSCIENCE Vol. 5, Issue 2 (1980). Sperry seems to have disposed of the issue of downward causation with the simple image of a wooden wheel rolling downhill. The wheel has emergent properties, at least in a broad understanding -- it is not made up of circular parts, but it is a circular whole. What about downward causation? Reductionists might want to say that the parts create the whole, rather than the reverse. But does the whole not affect the parts? The atoms of the wheel are going downhill because the wheel is going downhill, and it is going downhill because of its holistic, circula...
Ah, the mind-body problem. As regular readers of this blog may know, it has kept my mind twirling for decades. Sometimes I'm a dualist interactionist, something like Descartes but with aspirations to empiricism. Sometimes I'm an emergentist, seeing mind as something on an ontological level higher than mindless life, as life is on a higher level than lifeless chemistry. Sometimes, I'm a vitalist, seeing life -- even insect life -- as inherently mindful. Sometimes I believe in the earthsoul of which we are all expressions. Relatedly: sometimes, I am a panpsychic, finding mindfulness everywhere, not merely in life, even in the rocks. These four (or five) views have seemed very different from each other, and I haven't been able to reconcile them to my own satisfaction. Now I believe I have achieved a reflective equilibrium. Happy day. I'm an emergentist, and specifically one who embraces downward causation and a planetary mereology. Huh? Well...
On the 16th and 17th of November I posted here discussions of the "error theory" in meta-ethics [hereafter ET in ME]. This is nihilism by a somewhat fancier name. It is the view that our statements about right and wrong mean what they sound like they mean to untutored ears, they mean that we are making claims of knowledge about actions, situations, duties, etc. -- but they are always wrong, because we never really have such knowledge. I put off the matter of my own evaluation of error theory. But here we go. Note that a key argument is simply how ":queer" a sort of thing a moral fact is if it exists. Why does the error theorist think moral judgments are inherently "queer"? Mackie put it this way, to say that they are knowable facts is also to say that they are "intrinsically action guiding," independent of the "desires or purposes" of the one who is guided. Of course it is open to the opponent of ET/ME to say "it doesn't ...
In contemporary metaphysical discussions the word "emergence" and its variants play a big part. It often appears in the context of the mind-body problem. The mind (or intentionality, or consciousness, or whatever you may call the intangible subjective aspect of our reality) is said to have "emerged" at a certain moment in evolution, and to recapitulate this by "emerging" again at a certain moment in embryology. I think there is an element of word magic involved. We lessen the mystery of something by having a good word for it. IIRC, Samuel Alexander built an impressive metaphysical structure around this word magic. Matter, he said, emerged from space, then life from matter, then mind from life, like a growing ziggurat. I bring this up because I came across an intriguing discussion of the ambiguity of the word in my recent web surfing. Here is a link. It turns out that was written a year ago but, hey, that's an eyeblink for the chronology of ...