Patricia Churchland responds crisply to Colin McGinn in the New York Review of Books. (Colin McGinn. You’d think he’d go quiet for awhile, wouldn’t you, to let people’s memories fade.)
Other scientific disciplines are also extremely important in understanding the nature of the mind: genetics, ethology, anthropology, and linguistics. Philosophy can play a role too, when the philosopher sees it is rewarding to get out of the armchair. Some philosophers, such as Chris Eliasmith, for example, have truly made progress in computationally modeling how the brain represents the world.
Nevertheless, there are nostalgic philosophers who whinge on about saving the purity of the discipline from philosophers like me and Chris Eliasmith and Owen Flanagan and Dan Dennett. What do the purists, like McGinn, object to? It is that their lovely a priori discipline, where they just talk to each other and maybe cobble together a thought experiment or two, is being sullied by…data. Their sterile construal of philosophy is not one that would be recognized by the great philosophers in the tradition, such as Aristotle or Hume or Kant.
I get the feeling she doesn’t have a lot of patience for the salvation of disciplinary purity.
The view for which McGinn is known is a jejune prediction, namely that science cannot ever solve the problem of how the brain produces consciousness. On what does he base his prediction? Flimsy stuff. First, he is pretty sure our brain is not up to the job. Why not? Try this: a blind man does not experience color, and he will not do so even when we explain the brain mechanisms of experiencing color. Added to which, McGinn says that he cannot begin to imagine what it is like to be a bat, or how conscious experience might be scientifically explained (his brain not being up to the job, as he insists). This cognitive inadequacy he deems to have universal epistemological significance.
McGinn of course doesn’t see it that way, and says so, but I enjoyed Churchland more. (Misandry!)
I’m not even sure blind people don’t ‘experience’ colour. They don’t see it, but that’s a different matter; the brain structures for experiencing colour are still there even if the eyes can’t detect it.
I’ve also read reports of colour blind synesthetes experiencing ‘Martian colours’ their eyes are not equipped to see in response to non-visual stimuli.
Also there’s blindsight – people whose visual cortices are gone can still find things when asked to, although they will insist they were just guessing (but they find it every time – they really are seeing it – but they don’t know they’re seeing it).
Yeah, do you suppose McGinn has ever heard of blindsight? Consciousness isn’t quite everything it’s cracked up to be. It’s not so much how consciousness works that’s the real conundrum, so much as what exactly is it for?
And, connecting together the ‘what is it like to be a bat’ and the blind people ‘experiencing’ things… it was reported about three years back that the high-level ‘echolocator’ people (blind people explicitly using sound to help locate objects) could be found on an MRI to actually be using parts of their visual cortex to handle the spatial information.
http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/06/14/getting-around-by-sound-human-echolocation/ also notes that this isn’t as rare a skill as people think, that most people can pick up echo information at a subconscious level. And notes that how we actually perceive things around us is far more complicated than people usually think. Complications that have really only come up since we’ve had the technology to study neurological activity, but which have a significant impact on the far more philosophical question of how we know what we know about the world around us.
I think I need to go look up ‘Out of Sight’ on Youtube and watch that again…
Wait… really? That analogy is laughable.
A blind person may (because they might!) not experience sight. Fine, dandy. They can, however, understand sight.
The analogy would be an unconscious person experiencing/understanding consciousness, not an already conscious person learning the mechanisms that underlie that consciousness. Which is not only possible but probable in future. No idea what this guy is trying to prove.
“We can’t ever possibly know!”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re inadequate somehow!”
“…”
There’s a specific level of cognitive adequacy necessary to be able to find out the mechanism by which consciousness emerges from a biological system? How did you come across this piece of arcane knowledge? What level exactly? Does anyone come close?
Oh, you were just handwaving because you don’t want there to be solid data in your chosen field so you can continue sitting comfortably in your thinking chair? I thought so.
@3
“It’s not so much how consciousness works that’s the real conundrum, so much as what exactly is it for?”
Well, consciousness might not ‘for’ anything at all, it could simply be a by-product of other brain functions rather than a discrete phenomenon.
‘Experiencing’ a colour isn’t just sensory either; the senses trigger associations which ‘colour’ that colour.
Red, obviously, triggers emotions because it is the colour of blood so there’s a survival advantage to responding to it immediately. Every language has words for at least two colours – black and white – but if there’s a third colour it’s always red.
Whenever I see references to qualia it always sounds like they’re describing a sensory impression rather than the adaptive of cultural associations that are as much part of the experience of colour is the ‘sense’ that that colour is on a different part of the spectrum as blue or green.
And blindsight is doubly fascinating. Your hand can reach out and manipulate something – such as orienting a letter vertically or horizontally to fit a letter box you can’t ‘see’ – but something, some unconscious part of you, is not only ‘seeing’ the letter box but reasoning based on what it sees and manipulating the movement of your hands based on that reasoning.
In his reply to the above, McGinn say, “consciousness as it presents itself to introspection appears to be just a different kind of thing from activity in the brain. If this were not so, no one would ever have been a dualist.”, which is like an apologist claiming that the large numbers of faithful has any bearing on truth claims. What he is really saying is, “philosophers came up with definitions of minds before we even knew that brains housed reasoning. Because actual science fails to support our made up theories, there must obviously be something wrong with the science.”
There’s a specific level of cognitive adequacy necessary to be able to find out the mechanism by which consciousness emerges from a biological system?
The more you think about it the dumber McGinn sounds. I mean, if he’s claiming we can never understand consciousness then he’s pretty much denying consciousness exists, because what is consciousness other than an awareness we exist? If we are aware that we exist then we have already taken a step towards the understanding of consciousness. Scientists working on artificial intelligence generally agree that AI has to be recursive.
And once we recognise that we, ourselves, are conscious, its only a small step towards recognisibg that other people are conscious, and that other animals have some degree of consciousness. In fact its likely that there’s a feedback loop in recognising that we are conscious, in extending that understanding onto others, and then understanding ourselves better by observing others, and extending that greater understanding outwards, etc.
In his reply to the above, McGinn say, “consciousness as it presents itself to introspection appears to be just a different kind of thing from activity in the brain. If this were not so, no one would ever have been a dualist.”
And nobody would be religious if it wasn’t evident from introspection that we have an immortal soul. And only a fool could deny the evidence of their own eyes that the sun orbits the Earth – otherwise how do we explain day or night?
RJW @ 6, that’s pretty much where I’d place my bet.
Really? Let just switch something…
“…a person does not experience gamma rays, and he will not do so even when we explain the brain mechanisms of experiencing appreciation of supported hypotheses.”
Yawn…
He should read Self Comes to Mind.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/12/self-comes-mind-damasio-review
It does a pretty good job of describing what we know about consciousness so far. It’s even better when you’ve also been spending time trying to teach yourself neurobiology and anatomy in a functional manner.
I loved Churchland’s description of McGinn’s “argument from personal incredulity”.
This cognitive inadequacy he deems to have universal epistemological significance.
McGinn really does leave himself wide open, doesn’t he? His mysterian delusions are nowhere more explicit then when he says, “I was saying that it is factually false to describe groups of neurons as making decisions (the “homunculus fallacy”).” Didn’t we nail all this down with the debate over the Chinese Room?
She has the better of the rhetoric, but I think he has the better of the argument. Churchland’s position really is that the mind and the brain are the same thing, identical, when we understand the structure and mechanisms of the latter we will have grasped the former. It is strange that she resists this being made clear by McGinn, because I think she is usually clear about it herself. In fact, her analogy about genes at the end makes the point. So she does misrepresent both McGinn, and, I think, herself in her letter.
I realise there is more going on here because of McGinn’s ugly altercations with a grad student, but still, here I think he is right and she is wrong.
Brony @12
Thanks for mentioning ‘Self Comes to Mind’ my favourite book of the last few years.
Also recommended: Consciousness and the Brain by Dehaene.
@ Kevin
That book has streamlined how I think of emotional behavior and the workings of minds and brains in general to an astounding degree. I’m continuing to have more accurate understanding of my own atypical consciousness because of it.
@ geoffarnold
Noted.
I’m confused by the fact that some claim animals don’t have or have very little consciousness (I’ve heard that some even believe human babies aren’t conscious). If you are aware of your surroundings and able to interact with it and other living things, is that not consciousness?
“It’s not so much how consciousness works that’s the real conundrum, so much as what exactly is it for?”
So that we can ask “what is consciousness”?
@ theoreticalgrrrl
There are a lot more brain scientists that are becoming increasingly comfortable in appealing to similarities in minds between humans and non-humans. The past hesitancy was mostly because we did not have a good idea of what role various brain structures play in cognition and consciousness, and many continue that due to culture in brain science and other areas. Here is an interesting paper I found that includes some of this.
“Cross-species affective neuroscience decoding of the primal affective experiences of humans and related animals.”
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021236
This paper points at seven types of emotional arousals that seem to be very common in vertebrates (they say all vertebrates tested): Seeking, Rage, Fear, Lust, Care, Panic/Grief and Play.
In “Self Comes to Mind” Antonio Damasio is comfortable saying that if an animal shares structures and outward behavior with us, it’s not outrageous to suggest that they also share similar cognitive features even though the experience of it will be different from us.
The triangulation would run like this: (1) if a species has behaviors that are best explained by a brain with mind processes rather than by a brain with mere dispositions for action (such as reflexes); and (2) if the species has a brain with all the components that are described in the chapters ahead as necessary to make conscious minds in humans; (3) then, dear reader, the species is conscious. At the end of the day, I am ready to take any manifestation of animal behavior that suggests the presence of feelings as a sign that consciousness should not be far behind.
His definition of consciousness has a lot of elements. In general he says that consiouness,
…is a state of mind in which there is knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings. Consciousness is a state of mind—if there is no mind there is no consciousness; consciousness is a particular state of mind, enriched by a sense of the particular organism in which a mind is operating; and the state of mind includes knowledge to the effect that the said existence is situated, that there are objects and events surrounding it. Consciousness is a state of mind with a self process added to it.”
…and farther consciousness comes in degrees of intensity (think of things like jet lag, waking up, getting knocked out), and different degrees of scope (drinking a cup of coffee while relaxing, versus drinking a cup of coffee while talking about old memories with a friend), and shifts rapidly depending on motivation and perception.
Oh, and if you were looking for something a little more anatomy oriented, consciousness seems to be a function of how the brain creates maps of what contacts the body through the sensory apparatus, and how those maps relate to the self through experience vial emotional information. The self arises as a function of how the anatomy interacts with the environment in terms of relationships with things in perception and perceived body states. A useful topic to read about here is what is called embodied cognition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
These maps are not just from things like touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight. The brain also maps states of homeostasis (healthy/unhealthy conditions) of the body, the self and it’s interactions with the outside world (objects, people…), including social homeostasis. Emotions are essentially information signals about homeostasis and you also have emotional mapping systems that you use to store and recall emotional maps for use in your environment.
The self has pieces though. There is a protoself(with primordial feelings and emotions associated with basic body states, a core self that is about interactions between the self and objects and associated feelings, emotions, and has a core consciousness, and and autobiographical self that is about knowledge of one’s self as a thing that can know and is associated with feelings and emotions about perceptions of the past and hypothetical futures.
I’m not of the opinion that consciousness is a by-product of other brain functions. Call me “woo” but I just don’t buy it. I use some mental exercises that help me with things (rather not get into it here) and they seem to work consistently. I even think that telepathy may be a real phenomena, although not to the extent that “psychics” promote. I’ve had spontaneous precognitive experiences. Quite a few. I’ve analyzed these experiences from all angles and there is no other explanation other than precognition.
So you’re a dualist, then? Hope you’ve got a nice model for causality: Descartes’ pineal gland ideas are so last-millenium.
No, not a dualist.
Well, the long first paragraph of McGinn’s review of Churchland’s book is best described as a diatribe. A sarcastic one at that. But then when she replies in the same tone he calls it “heated rhetoric”. I think this tells me everything I need to know really.
The precognition I’ve experience have always had to do with the physical safety of myself and close family and close friends. I’m not an anything “ist”, just trying to figure things out as I go based on experience and information.
“there is no other explanation other than precognition” Argument from personal incredulity? (A bit like McGinn.) If not, what?
BTW, this thread led me to read this nice little piece, which in turn is leading me to re-read Dennett. So thanks…
It would be more accurate to say that consciousness is the experience of how the brain functions as it learns to map the world and stores/recalls emotional information relevant to what is in perception. There is a lot of information about what specific structures are involved in creating and storing the maps, creating and maintaining the emotional information, and judging what is in perception.
A lot of mental exercises have been correlated with alterations in the structure and function of many of these structures. For example mindfulness meditation and things like the Insular Cortex (also called the Insula, it’s like an emotional “heads up display”).
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201403/the-neuroscience-social-pain
As for things like precognition, all I can say is that I have no experience of such and while you are undoubtedly experiencing something, I have not really been convinced by attempts to demonstrate that something like that exists.
@21
Thanks for the invitation—I’ll definitely call you ‘woo’.
I once had a precognitive experience that an airliner would crash somewhere, amazingly it actually occurred. We all selectively select those experience that verify our expectations, think of all those experiences where your ‘precognitive abilities’ failed and apply some elementary probability theory.
I also don’t understand the relevance of parapsychology to a discussion about consciousness.
You don’t even know what my experience was, but feel free to mock your assumptions of what happened, RJW. I am fully aware of selective thinking, confirmation bias, etc. My experience honestly doesn’t fit these explanations. I am being sincere. They were very specific, completely spontaneous, out of the blue, and involved literal life or death situations. I had the information before the event happened, which helped me avoid a lethal situation.
I am not talking about parapsychology or the “supernatural.” That’s why I felt it was on topic. If there is precognition, to me it would be completely natural and would have a material explanation. Something to do with electromagnetism or time perception, possibly, maybe? I don’t know. I really shouldn’t have brought it up here. I feel stupid.
It would be nice to find people who either aren’t woo-y or the opposite extreme, to discuss things like this…people have these entrenched views influenced by religion that are very hard to shake.
But I understand the reaction and I’m sorry for the derail.
@ 29
theorecticalgrrrl,
Sorry, my comments were rather sarcastic.
Certainly you’re convinced, however you haven’t established the validity of precognition statistically, or has any peer reviewed scientific study as far as I know–I’m not doubting your sincerity, just the significance of your experience.
You really need to establish that the proposed phenomenon exists before seeking a scientific explanation.
If you’re ever interested in discussing your experiences I’d be very interested.
@ theoreticalgrrrl 29
For what it is worth I have had some funny experiences myself. I’ve had dreams that seem to have come true after the fact and other weirdness. Such is worth exploring, but absent examples of being able to do that sort of thing in other areas it’s still more reasonable for me to think that what I experienced may be a form of subconscious editing of my own memories based on shared perceptual elements after the fact.
As for the derail, I guess it unless Ophelia tell us otherwise it’s hard to know if it’s a derail. You can always ask her if she minds the conversation if the original topis is not longer being discussed.
I think I’ve become persona non grata on B&W so I won’t be posting on this blog or any other FTBlogs in the future, but I just wanted to say thank you to RJW and Brony for your comments.
Also, Brony, I really enjoyed all our conversations in the various comment threads of Pharyngula and here the last week or so. Thank you for it, you are a very kind and intelligent person.