Category: Philosophy

As I do most weekends, I phoned my mother in Oxford today. After exchanging family news, the subject turned to my philosophy course. “I just caught a story on BBC Oxford about a new philosophy group here,” she said. “Of course wasn’t able to read about it in the paper,” [because of her blindness] “but I think it was about the study of consciousness.” As we spoke, I quickly searched and came up with the obvious hit. “Are you talking about the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind,” I asked. “The project that Susan Greenfield… sorry, Baroness Susan Greenfield is heading up? This led to a short digression about Tony Blair’s habit of handing out life peerages like school prizes, and then discussing our disappointment at the lack of rigour in many of Greenfield’s publications. After that, I told my mother about OXCSOM’s approach:

Initially there will be eight academics on the payroll of the Centre from six different departments: Anatomy, Pharmacology, Philosophy, Physiology, the Ian Ramsey Centre (Theology), and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. The researchers will employ a wide range of techniques, including functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

“I wonder how the theologians will get on with fMRI,” I mused, and my mother assured me that that as Oxford theologians they would embrace it enthusiastically. “By the way,” I said, “do you know where OXCSOM is getting its money? It’s hosted by the IAN RAMSEY CENTRE [studying the relationship of religious belief and science], and funded by the John Templeton Foundation.” Both of us vaguely recognized the name – something about underwriting a scientific study of prayer. [Turns out he’s a Tennessee-born investment manager.]

As we talked, I clicked on a few links… and then I couldn’t contain myself any more. “So, let me tell you about another Templeton project I’ve just come across. It’s called The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love.” “What on earth do they mean by ‘unlimited love’, and how do you do research in it?” said my mother. “It all sounds very flakey.” I clicked the About us link. “No problem,” I said. “They’ve got all that covered. By ‘unlimited love’, they mean ‘love for all humanity without exception’. And as for research, ‘Just as we investigate the force of gravity or the energy of the atom, we can scientifically examine the power of unlimited love in human moral and spiritual experience.’ Easy.”

My mother sighed. “You know, a friend of mine, a newspaper columnist, told me that he was giving up on satire,” she said. “He feels that nothing he can write matches up to the reality of today’s world.” And we agreed that satire is dead, and set a time for our next conversation.

Not from real work… but at Tufts I’m on break for the next week; our mid-term papers are due on Monday March 28. Mine is a dialogue between Fodor, Millikan and Churchland (plus Simplicus). Fortunately it will be in direct speech, so I won’t have to worry that said is dead.
(Is that weird or what? I picked it up on Neil Gaiman’s blog, where he has a much more interesting perspective.)

Yet another snowstorm this weekend, bringing us to over 90 inches for the season. It snowed most of Saturday: big, wet flakes that stuck to all the trees and left inches of slushy stuff on the driveway. Very pretty… now go away!
Rather than venture out, I spent most of the weekend curled up with philosophy. Not only do I have a mid-term paper due in a couple of weeks, and my regular reading to do for class; I also received the new Dennett book, Sweet Dreams, on Saturday. (Amazon.com is hopelessly confused about this book: in some places it says that it’s coming on April 1, in others that it’s available now, shipping in 24 hours.)
Back in November, I blogged about David Chalmers and his obsession with zombies (philosophical and otherwise). In Sweet Dreams, Dennett discusses what he calls the Zombic Hunch: the intuitive idea that there might conceivably be zombie-like creatures that are EXACTLY LIKE ORDINARY PEOPLE except that they don’t have consciousness. Personally I find the notion of zombies incoherent – even in principle – but apparently a lot of people take them seriously. Like Dennett, I find the idea of philosophers arguing about the number of zombies that can fit on the head of a pin to be slightly unedifying. Oh well. If you want to get a feel for the issue without buying Dennett’s or Chalmers’ books, you can read this account of their debate.
And now I have to finish my notes on Searle’s infuriating Chinese Room. There are some interesting issues in this famous thought experiment, but ever since I first read it in The Mind’s I (over 20 years ago) I’ve been frustrated by the blatant equivocation and contradiction in the way Searle presents it. Perhaps it’s a useful discipline for me: learning to concentrate on [the important bits of] the message without being distracted by the lousy medium.

I know that I shouldn’t get hung up on terminology: these things are just arbitrary labels, aren’t they? Well, no – we can’t simply ignore the everyday meanings of words. So when Koch (and Block too) went on about the NCC, or neural correlate of consciousness during the symposium, it felt wrong. It was as if a biologist had been talking about the CCO, the chemical correlate of organisms, instead of cells. Yes, cells are made of chemicals, but no biologist would indulge in such a crude reductionism.
Talking about the neural correlates of consciousness sounds respectfully non-committal: after all, it just talks about correlation, nothing causal. But to my ears, there is certainly a strong implication of stable correlation, rather than (e.g.) a pattern that is stable at some higher level but is not bound to any specific neural elements. If such patterns exist, the minimal NCC would presumably encompass the entire collection of neurons which could potentially support them; this doesn’t sound like what Koch is getting at.
In general, I would prefer to adopt a more flexible systems-oriented language for the working of the mind, and explore the constraints and preferences that flow from the properties of the neural substratum. It is easier to capture the relationships between concepts at several levels of [evolutionary] design than it is to tease apart a single idea into multiple elements at different levels.
(In computing we call this refactoring: it’s hard enough at a single level, extraordinarily difficult when multiple levels are involved.)

Excellent symposium at Harvard Medical School this afternoon. A few observations follow. (Interesting how it’s easier to write about the positions with which you disagree, isn’t it?) And a nice bonus was finally getting to meet Bryan Bentz, a long-time fellow member of the Al Stewart mailing list.

• Dan Dennett (Tufts): Qualia, Unsplittable Atoms? If we want to go on using the term qualia, we have to give up the idea that they are ineffable and intrinsic. I drank that Kool-Aid a long time ago: no argument from me. A surprisingly direct rap at Block (citing his infamous jazz metaphor), and a nifty ju-jitsu move in response to Block’s attempt at a reductio in the Q&A. Thoroughly enjoyable.
• Patrick Haggard (UC London): Voluntary Action: Conscious Intention and Neural Activity: Updating Libet’s classic experiments on the Readiness Potential, which measured the curious fact that your brain starts preparing to act physically up to a second before you are conscious of deciding to act. Elegant experimental design has a distinctive aesthetics; this was a delightful talk. (I was reminded of one of my favourite books: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Florman.)
• Ned Block (BYU): Two Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Block proposes a distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness – roughly, the stuff that we’re aware of, and the subset that we can actually work with at the moment. This is a subtle distinction that some feel is either irrelevant (because in practice the categories coincide) or just plain wrong. My feeling is that Block overstretches when he tries to cite particular brain activation patterns as evidence of the distinction. (He also relies on Koch and Crick’s NCC concept – see below.) In addition, it seems to me (after insufficient thought, I’m sure) that accessibility crops up in other ways than this particular dichotomy: it feels more like a property of a mental event which captures one way in which it stands in relation to other events and functional systems of the mind. I’m not convinced by Block’s coupling of the idea to one aspect of consciousness, with a particular neurological implementation.
• Christof Koch (Caltech): Studying visual consciousness in humans using microelectrodes, magnets, and TV’s: I guess that Koch is the kind of hyperthyroidal character that you either love or loathe. He’s not my cup of tea at all. At the centre of his talk was a series of experiments in which the brain of an epileptic patient was wired up to explore the use of fine-grained electrical stimulation to control his seizures; a side benefit of this was that the same system could be used to detect the state of a few individual neurons. Koch showed the patient (and hence us) large numbers of faces, particularly those of celebrities; he found that certain pictures provoked neuronal activity. (In one case he found that the printed name of he person produced the same activity….) Rather than interpreting this data cautiously and skeptically, Koch started going on about “the Bill Clinton neuron” and the “Jennifer Aniston neuron”. I wish I’d been able to ask him to admit that his catchy phrase “the XXX neuron” really stands for “a random neuron which plays an unknown role in a larger neural structure [the NCC, or neural correlate of consciousness] which is activated in some way by XXX”. Even if it was a detector of some kind, it might play a functional role (“big nose”, “green eyes”, “sexy”) or indicate some correlation (“like Aunty Flo”, “seen on TV”). But Koch seems to be a true believer. In response to one question, he railed against “holistic” and “emergent” positions, or theories based on “patterns”. He espoused “specificity”, which for him seems to go down to the level of the single neuron. Unconvincing.

This afternoon I’m heading over to the Harvard Medical School in Longwood to attend a symposium exploring the neuroscientific and philosphical aspects of Consciousness. The speakers are Dan Dennett from Tufts (my PhilOfMind prof), Patrick Haggard from UCL, Ned Block of NYU, and Chris Koch from CalTech. I’ve read enough of Dennett, Block and Koch to know that they’re pretty far apart on many issues, so it should be “stimulating”!

Thought for the day:

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”

David Hume, 1739

Five days without a blog entry… unthinkable! But I’ve actually been very busy, catching up with my reading for the Philosophy of Mind course I’m taking this semester at Tufts.
Now you have to understand that the last time I was in school was back in 1977, when I was at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne in England. 28 years on and 3,500 miles away, things are a little different! This class meets twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. Before each session, we go through a selection of readings on the topic for the day and submit our comments (which are assessed as part of the grading). We post the comments by 9pm the day before the class to an on-line Blackboard discussion board, where we can (and do!) all read and comment on each others’ submissions. And finally a streaming video of each class is posted to the Blackboard about a week after the class.
One thing that I’ve been worried about is how occasional business travel might disrupt class work. It looks as if the web-based tools will definitely help. I can see it now: reading the next selections at FL350 BOS-SFO, comments and dialogue via Blackboard from the Holiday Inn in Palo Alto…. Not ideal, but feasible. We’ll see.

In his latest contribution to this discussion, Masood asks why I feel that the question “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” is incoherent. It’s because I find it breaks down under either of the common senses of “why” – the causal or the teleological. In each case, the question self-destructs in two ways. Causality presumes a cause – something that made the “anything” happen. Teleology presumes an agent: one cannot have agent-less purpose. In each case, we presume “something”. Now, either we are faced with an “infinite regress” – “why does the cause/agent exist rather than nothing?” – or [my favourite] by invoking some antecedent “thing”, the “nothing” alternative is rendered moot! (Simultaneous annihilation of the antecedent and creation of the consequent feels like a stretch!)

The traditional way to make headway with the question is to constrain the universals (“anything” and “nothing”) to some category, assigning the causal or teleological agents to a different category. (This is the supernatural or religious turn.) Thus, “Why is there a universe rather than nothing? God made the universe, but God is not of the universe: She transcends it”. But this simply pushes the question back – why is there an agent/cause rather than nothing? At this point, most people adopt the device of decreeing that the two categories are causally or teleologically different; that it’s OK for a Prime Mover to be self-caused and eternal but not for everyday stuff. Of course this proposition is arbitrary and entirely unverifiable.

Those who believe that the orginal question must have an answer are pretty much forced into this dualism, of course. For myself, I have no need of that hypothesis; the question is not meaningful to me. I imagine that a psychologist would say that we actually start with the Weltanschauung of our choice/heritage (theist/dualist or atheist/materialist); we then interpret the meaningfulness of the question based upon our stance. Thus a theist believes that there is a Prime Cause, and therefore the anything or nothing question must be coherent. Etcetera.

Thought for the day: Do humans have direct voluntary control over their beliefs? Per Michael Sudduth: “This is the so-called doxastic voluntarism thesis. According to this view, a cognitive attitude (belief, disbelief, or withholding of belief) is justified only if the cognitive attitude is within our direct voluntary control. However, there is good reason to suppose that this thesis is false…” This is intriguing: I had always assumed that we do not have voluntary control over our beliefs, and I was surprised to find the idea that we do was sufficiently respectable that it had acquired an impressively polysyllabic name….

I came across the term while reading a review by Jeff Wisdom of Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them. I bought the book this morning, anticipating a well-reasoned approach to reconciling humanistic expectations with scientific realities. Like Jeff, I have been disappointed that Flanagan has (so far) failed to address the deeper objections to his, fairly orthodox, views. Now I happen to share most of Flanagan’s ideas (though not his Buddhism), but this doesn’t mean that there are no arguments to be made. Oh well; even if it isn’t a rigorous treatment of the subject, it should be an enjoyable read on my flight back to Boston on Monday.