A prominent philosopher has just received a MacArthur Award, a/k/a a "genius grat". The MacArthur Awards -- half a million US dollars with no strings attached to an individual thought to show such originality and promise that he or she ought to have the freedom that sort of cash can provide -- has gone to Felipe de Brigard, a philosopher working on mind/body issues. Specifically, Felipe de Brigard works at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, affiliated with Duke University in North Carolina. (Go, Blue Devils!) Felipe De Brigard | Duke Institute for Brain Sciences He is the author of an article on "Vitalism in the age of AI," which sounds intruging from its title but sounds rather deadening from its abstract. Vitalism in the age of AI - PubMed Apparently, he is in dialog with such scholars as Anil Seth and Andy Clark on the issue of whether consciousness is "substrate independent." I have never before heard of any of the three of them,...
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We return to Andrew and Briony. There is a bit in chapter three in which Andrew is describing to his therapist a road trip: our two young lovers drive from southern California to New York City, taking turns at the wheel. For the final stretch, beginning in Atlanta, the one not at the wheel was reading out loud. From Mark Twain, whom Andrew refers to, familiarly as MT. The book of MT's that enlivened those hours and days of driving? The therapist guesses Huckleberry Finn. Andrew corrects him. The book was The Prince and the Pauper. And he puts what I take it is a Doctorow-esque gloss on this book: The two boys exchange identities, the prince is the pauper and the pauper is the prince. Briony liked the romance of that, Clemens saying there's nothing to royalty but the assumption. But it's more than a democratic parable: it's a tale for brain scientists. Given the inspiration, anyone can step into an identity because the brain is deft, it c...
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 ...
Ya gotta be kidding me. Three hundred and fifty? I cited New Scientist Wednesday . Today I'm invoking it again in connection with another of my favorite subjects -- the mind/body problem. What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality | New Scientist The article, by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, breaks the 350 contemporary contending theories into ten buckets: 1. materialism 2. non-reductive physicalism 3. quantum mechanical 4. information based 5. panpsychic 6. neutral monism [buckets one and eight are the non-neutral monisms] 7. dualism 8. idealism 9. anamolous and altered states [i.e. taking 'parapsychology' seriously] 10. challenge [i.e. accepting that the answer is beyond human capacity -- as suggested perhaps by the above cartoon]. My own preferred view, emergentism, is treated by Kuhn as a form of non-reductive physicalism, bucket 2.
I hope I have made clear to regular readers of this humble mind that I am not a believer in panpsychism. My own view of the mind-body relation, on the other hand, is a form of emergentism, which ends up in a place quite similar to old-fashioned mind-body dualism and interactionism. But I did find of interest a recent paper's breakdown of the three broad arguments for panpsychism: the continuity argument, the Hegelian argument, and the Agnostic argument. In brief that means: 1) Continuity. All matter must have some element of mind in it because otherwise there would be a radical and incomprehensible discontinuity in the history of matter in the world. 2) Hegelian. Panpsychism offers a sort of dialectical synthesis between materialism and dualism with the upside of each and the downside of neither. 3) Agnostic. No idea of the intrinsically non-experiential [something neither mental nor proto-mental] could even be intelligible to us. The overall point of the p...
New book. May be of interest to some of those who follow this blog. The Cartesian Brain , a collection of essays edited by Denis Kamboucher, Damien Lacroux, Tad Schmalz and Ruidan She, has just been published by Routledge. It looks at Cartesian writings far beyond the Meditations . One might get from the Meditations the impression that Descartes didn't care all that much about the brain, and nascent neuroscience. After all, the "I think" is accomplished by an incorporeal spirit. Actually, it turns out, he did care about the particulars of the human brain. and not just the pineal gland either. One fascinating tidbit I get from the review of this book recently posted in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews is the applicability of the "law of the conservation of motion" to the action of mind on brain. I put the phrase in quotes because in Newtonian and post-Newtonian physics, our physics, there is no such law. There is a law of the conservation of momentum: but tha...
Yesterday, I offered my summary of two powerful-seeming arguments against mind-body dualism in any form. My plan was today, to give my reasons for concluding after a lot of deliberation on the point, that neither argument is as powerful as it appears -- and as it HAS appeared, historically, to many powerful minds from whom I have learned a great deal. But on further deliberation, that has come to seem too ambitious for a single blog post. I will wrote today about just the first of them ... here we go. About continuity. TL:DR version: The emergence of an intangible mind out of evolving life is not a violation of a principle of continuity to whatever degree we actually need and (upon reflection) want such a principle. It is no more of a violation than a variety of other emergences of which we make no such commotion. One intriguing and I think under-noticed fact is that the argument from continuity against the development of an intangible min...
Mario de Caro and Matteo Grasso together wrote "Three Views of Downward Causation" for publication in the 2017 anthology, "P hilosophical and scientific perspectives on downward causation." Nothing much to do with the Koestler book, but I like that cover image. The issue of "downward causation" is one that arises in the philosophy of mind, among those who believe that mind and body, even mind and brain, are different facts in the world, neither reducible to the other. The issue of downward causation is: how if at all can mental events cause physical events? How does my phenomenal desire that my arm move lead to my arm moving? De Caro and Grasso contend that naturalism is consistent with the reality of downward causation. We do not have to postulate any non-natural facts, souls, trans-empirical egos, a ghost in the machine, etc., in order to acknowledge that the desire is a non-phys...
"Without Piaget's ... genetic-epistemology, arriving on the heels of Freud's death, or the integration of semiotic mediation,the fundamental continuity between body and mind, and therefore the translation from unconscious to conscious modes of thought, remained highly polarized and mired in physicalist metaphors describing, but not explaining, the functional/formal shifts in organization of a multi-tiered, polysemic, sign-infused psyche." I believe I've already mentioned in this blog the anthology in psychoanalysis and the mind-body problem published recently by Routledge. The above passage is drawn from that anthology, from an essay by Anna Aragna. The passage is quite difficult to follow (and no, not because I have removed it from a context that would otherwise have been illuminating -- it just IS.) But, abstracting where I can from the jargon, what I gather is this. Aragna sees the "fundamental continuity of body and mind" as both a premise and a p...
My recent reading includes PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (2022), an anthology edited by Jon Mills. This is not one of those several-conflicting-points-of-view anthologies. Mills himself and the various authors involved all seem to share the point of view, though they approach it from different directions. Their contention, in a few words, is that psychoanalysis -- which these authors associate almost entirely with the work of Sigmund Freud and his most devoted followers -- implies the ontological position known as "dual-aspect monism." Specifically, the libidinous drive at the heart of Freudianism is neither material nor mental. It is a neutral sort of stuff, developed out of the body (which has the natural-selection defined drives to survive and to reproduce) but not simply a description of the body, yet again not mental stuff in a traditional sense of the term either. One way to think about the Freudian notion of "the unconscious" is pre...
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...
Daniel Dennett gets credit (or, if you will, blame -- we'll come to that) for the expression "Cartesian Theatre" as a name for a flaw in many theories of the human mind. The idea behind the phrase is this: one intuitive way to think of perception is as the recreation of an outward reality within an inner space. Think of a little version of yourself watching a movie relating events that are happening outside the walls of the theatre. The movie is produced in something like real time due to sensors on the outer walls of the same building. Of course if we do think of perception that way, we are open to the question: can the little guy who is my real self be sure that the movie is accurate? Maybe an evil demon has tampered with the processes of production? The way to solve such puzzles, according to Dennett, is to abandon the idea of the Cartesian theatre altogether. Now comes Markus Gabriel, a philosopher I've been reading lately. You may remember that I menti...
In a Facebook group recently, a FB friend asked me why I believe there is a "mind-body problem" that requires resolution. I responded with reference to the classic historical novel (and television mini-series) I,Claudius. Instead of thinking of something new and clever to say in this blog today, I'll repeat what I said there. There is in general the appearance of something intangible in the world, to which one person has privileged access, and the question of how it relates to the tangibles of the world, to which anyone has access. I, Claudius is about a man who appeared from his physicality, from all tangible and public evidence, to be a stuttering idiot. Yet "inside," in some intangible way, he was cunning and clear-eyed -- facts that allowed him to survive as others around him died and in time to become Emperor. (I don't think that really counts as a spoiler -- the charm of the series does not depend on how it will turn out.) ...
John Searle is no longer affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley. He has been stripped of his emeritus title. This is quite a comedown since Searle's name regularly shows up on lists of the most prominent and influential philosophers writing today. Let's review a little intellectual history. As of the late 1970s, the dominant view of consciousness, intelligence, and the mind-body relationship among professional philosophers in the Anglosphere was functionalism. There was a lot of disagreement about the details, but mostly consensus on the big picture. The idea was that the brain was a machine that functioned more or less like a digital computer. Or, at any rate, its functions could be indefinitely approximated by a digital computer. Thus, there was nothing fundamental (just irrelevant biological history) setting the brain aside from what algorithms embodied with wires and on/off gates can or will eventually be able to do. Alan Turing had speculated ab...
My own post titles are, I recognize, quite pedestrian. Today I'd like to recognize some cleverness on the point, from a philosopher writing about one of my regular obsessions, the mind-body problem. Edward Feser, a Thomist, once headlined a post on his blog thus: Animals are conscious! In other news, sky is blue, water wet. Good one. "Woof."
In yesterday's post I laid out three "neutralist" theories and said something about the relationship of William James' thought to each. I'd like to tie that line of inquiry up a bit today. Again, the theories are: neutral monism; dual aspect theory; panpsychism. What they maintain in each case is that there is some stuff that is neither mental nor physical, and that the mental and physical realms are constructions out of this stuff, so that we can allow for mind-body interaction without freaking out over HOW? For a neutral monist, the stuff is an underlying collection of data or unclassified facts such as an image of a piece of paper. For a dual aspect theory, the stuff is God, the Universe, Everything Considered as a Totality. For a panpsychist, the stuff is, well, mindful matter. Which includes all matter (and, likely enough, all mind.) I shared yesterday, too, my own impression that the first listed of those three arises out of a principle of pars...
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 ...
I'm thinking just now, for no good reason, of the book Arthur Lovejoy wrote, published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. back in 1930, The Revolt Against Dualism. Although written as a historical inquiry, the point of the book is to lead us to a substantive philosophical conclusion: revolts against dualism have failed because they must fail, because dualism is an enduring fact about the world and our place therein. Efforts to deny that fact collapse. The book is, then, analogous to Lovejoy's better known work, The Great Chain of Being. In both cases, Lovejoy treats us to a chronological discussion of an idea that, in his view, has failed in fact because it of necessity must fail, and thus an idea we as a species would be wise to abandon. Chain discussed an idea in macro-chronological terms, as millennia passed. But Revolt was a very micro-chronological history. It focused on the 30 year period prior to publication. Anyway: if you're still reading at ...