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9780231141000

Consciousness and Mental Life

by
  • ISBN13:

    9780231141000

  • ISBN10:

    0231141009

  • Edition: 1st
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 2008-01-01
  • Publisher: COLUMBIA UNIV PRESS

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Summary

In recent decades, issues that reside at the center of philosophical and psychological inquiry have been absorbed into a scientific framework variously identified as "brain science," "cognitive science," and "cognitive neuroscience." Scholars have heralded this development as revolutionary, but a revolution implies an existing method has been overturned in favor of something new. What long-held theories have been abandoned or significantly modified in light of cognitive neuroscience?Consciousness and Mental Lifequestions our present approach to the study of consciousness and the way modern discoveries either mirror or contradict understandings reached in the centuries leading up to our own. Daniel N. Robinson does not wage an attack on the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Rather, he provides the necessary historical context to properly evaluate the relationship between issues of consciousness and neuroscience and their evolution over time.Robinson begins with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks and continues through to René Descartes, David Hume, William James, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Derek Parfit. Approaching the issue from both a philosophical and a psychological perspective, Robinson identifies what makes the study of consciousness so problematic and asks whether cognitive neuroscience can truly reveal the origins of mental events, emotions, and preference, or if these occurrences are better understood by studying the whole person, not just the brain. Well-reasoned and thoroughly argued, Consciousness and Mental Lifecorrects many claims made about the success of brain science and provides a valuable historical context for the study of human consciousness.

Table of Contents

Prefacep. vii
Acknowledgmentsp. xi
The Greeks (Again) and the "Consciousness" Problemp. 1
The Problem of Consciousness "Solved"p. 17
"Cartesianism" Revisitedp. 51
Higher-Order Thought: A Machine in the Ghostp. 83
Self-Consciousnessp. 101
Emotionp. 145
Motives, Desires, and Fulfillmentp. 169
Plans: An Epiloguep. 201
Notesp. 211
Indexp. 233
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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CHAPTER 8: PLANS

There would seem to be little evolutionary point to consciousness except as an aid, if not a necessary instrument, for planning a future. I must be clear on this. What registers in consciousness moment by moment is gone before anything can be done about it. Having some means by which to store or preserve such happenings is also pointless, unless the record is to be of use at a later time. Metaphorically speaking, and within the (arguably relevant) framework of evolutionary psychology, what counts in consciousness is a past that can be brought into it as a means by which to engage the future, often the immediate future. Consciousness thus understood is a mode of deliberation distinct from awareness. To be aware is to be in contact with the present. To be consciously aware is to be disposed toward all that might follow based on all that has preceded. One of the roots of “conscious” is scio, alerting us to the epistemic element that, when removed, leaves only awareness in its wake. It would be tempting to reduce all this to an equation: Consciousness = awareness + knowledge. This is haphazard. Consciousness has a focus and is therefore not in any way a passive state. It is rather a state of what might be called directed awareness, and in this respect would seem to have a volitional component, itself needful of knowledge, no matter how minimal. It is doubtless that the engineering required here is preestablished in some respects and forged in the kilns of experience in still other respects. To focus is to filter. It is to exclude all but the target. Some filtering is passive. Human vision is effective in rendering visible electromagnetic radiation falling within the range of wavelengths from about 360to about 760nanometers. Shorter (ultraviolet) and longer (infrared) wavelengths are not seen. So, too, with auditory sensations. Human beings can experience sounds falling in the frequency range of about twenty to about 20,000hertz. The sensory systems thus have a passive filtering power imposed by their structural and physiological nuances and limitations. Filtering is also selective. We are able to maintain a conversation in a noisy room, hearing clearly what our interlocutor has to say and remaining largely oblivious to “extraneous” sound. We call the process attention, but in the background are surely factors best understood as volitional, motivational, and emotional. We can shift our attention at will, and we do so just in case we are moved by something more salient than the content of the ongoing conversation. By a shout of “FIRE!” for example—or even by the soft mention of our name in a distant corner of the room.

To speak of plans is to speak of activity that might be as simple and immediate as the next two steps or as complex and remote as the pianistic prowess one hopes to gain over a period of decades. The latter plan, illustrative of many that occupy large fractions of a conscious lifetime, aims at a state or condition that cannot be known until it is attained. There is no “picture” of it here and now, or tomorrow, or next year. One might in some vague sense seem to be getting closer but this very sense is less “sensory” than imaginative. To plan is to imagine. And to imagine is to weigh alternatives and, again, to “filter” out nonstarters or items lower on the list of things worth pursuing. The searching question arising from these ubiquitous facts of folk psychology is whether “cognitive neuroscience” is the right model of explanation, the right path to a deeper or fuller understanding of that planning that reflects the actively lived life, the life outside the vat. As might be expected, Daniel Dennett speaks most clearly for the influential quarter subscribing to a functionalist perspective and the confidence it inspires in computational approaches to matters of this sort. Consider the following passage:Since the earliest days of cognitive science, there has been a particularly bold brand of functionalistic minimalism in contention, the idea that just as a heart is basically a pump, and could in principle be made of anything so long as it did the requisite pumping without damaging the blood, so a mind is fundamentally a control system, implemented in fact by the organic brain, but anything else that could compute the same control functions would serve as well.... If all that matters is the computation, we can ignore the brain’s wiring diagram, and its chemistry, and just worry about the “software” that runs on it. In short—and now we arrive at the provocative version that has caused so much misunderstanding—in principle you could replace your wet, organic brain with a bunch of silicon chips and wires and go right on thinking (and being conscious, and so forth).The philosophers’ zombies have haunted the literature on consciousness for more than a decade, their putative powers and limitations supplying grist for learned argument. The usual account has them very much like the rest of us in behavior but devoid of consciousness. Dennett’s variant, fortified by the “intentional stance,” possesses consciousness in whatever sense anyone or anything does, in so far as it performs (functions) as do those items uncontroversially credited with consciousness. So zombies as such fit into this picture, for they, too, may be made up of the same requisite chips by which they may well “go right on thinking (and being conscious and so forth).” Consciousness, then, pardonably the last holdover in the once thick but now paper-thin book of mysteries, is an elaborate achievement of a congeries of microcircuits, each of them in isolation devoid of mental properties but in unison the source of these very properties. Dennett draws inspiration here from the success in accounting for metabolism in such terms, though no single cell can do the job. He would be impatient, I suspect, with the reminder that “metabolism” refers to events having no physical properties not found in every cell: mass, extension, oxidation, etc. Neither the single cell nor the entire participating choir of cells offers any evidence whatever of consciousness. That turns out to be a property of mine—and yours. To ask just how so many cells bring this about begs the question. From all that is now known about cells, in isolation and in networks, the scientifically responsible position should be that there is no clear evidence or coherent theory warranting a physicalistic explanation. If there is any sort of warrant at all, it is one of inference from the world of already established and purely physical event-sequences. But this very inference is, again, a begging of the question at issue.

What has made zombies so interesting to philosophers? The picture here is cloudy. Some would argue that the existence of zombies must be an embarrassment to physicalists in that these seeming and utterly physical systems nonetheless have mental properties, no matter how diminished.2 Dennett, as we have seen, argues the other way. It doesn’t matter either way, however, for, if it came about that a large number of silicon chips gave rise to consciousness, the explanatory gap would remain as wide as ever. The chatter about zombies is beside the point.

What is not beside the point is whether a large number of silicon chips can ground plans and purposes of the sort that characterize actual lives. That such chips can, as it were, retain a record of such plans is doubtless; the same is true of filing cabinets and tape recorders. To ground plans (as distinct from recording them) is to imagine possibilities. Of course, possibilities can be schematized and reduced to a computational format; otherwise, Deep Blue would have been a very poor program for making chess moves. Note, however, that there is more than one sense of an outcome being possible and more than one sense of a given outcome realizing a plan. The decision to ride one’s bicycle to the lecture is a conscious decision. The actual sensory-motor sequences associated with cycling (a) realize the plan but (b) unfold without conscious deliberation. In one sense, “possible” means no more than that something is allowable or permissible. A simple thermostat, composed of a bimetallic strip, will keep ambient temperature within a given range. The metals and contact points can be chosen such that a two-degree drop in temperature will find the metal bending in one direction; a two-degree increase, in the opposite direction. How the strip bends then determines whether the furnace is turned on or off. The “possibilities” here are not imagined. They are simply the given facts of the ambient environment, which act upon an inert element. The thermostat does not envisage possibilities nor does it plan to control ambient temperature. The conceptual drawbacks of functionalism are made evident by such devices. It is true but trite to say that two entities are functionally indistinguishable when they behave in such a way as to perform the same function. It is a theory of uncertain validity to claim that the behavior of two entities performing the same function is explicable in the same terms. ( Pace Alan Turing.) The weather, operating over eons, surely might forge out of rock a shapely specimen with the appearance of a face; the same might be achieved by a sculptor. Only by crude metaphor would one refer to sculpting as “weathering in fast forward.”

Functionalism as an ism brings far too much to the table for it to claim the alleged virtues of metaphysical minimalism. The heart is a band of cardiac muscle and a bundle of neural structures (the bundle of His), divided up into chambers separated by valves. All this apparatus moves blood; it also makes sounds and gives rise to a palpable “pulse.” It also allows for the widespread distribution of oxygen and the removal of carbon monoxide. It also results in thoracic sensations associated with emotion. It brings color to the cheeks and warmth to the extremities. If one takes the “function” of the heart to be coloration of the cheeks, then the heart and a pad of rouge in a cosmetics case serve the same function. Thus, if our wet brain can (as Dennett says) be replaced by silicon chips, just in case the “functions” served by the brain are now properly carried out, then the heart can be replaced by rouge, if the “function” of the heart is to color the cheeks—or by a clock, if the “function” of the heart is to make regular ticking sounds. If, indeed, it is a “function” of the brain to generate consciousness, there must be some mode of generation as well as an end state that is plausibly connected to what is taken to be the source. This is unproblematic when the end state is the movement of blood, the creation of regular sounds, the reddening of the cheeks. It is highly problematic when the end state is indubitably knowable solely to the possessor of that particular brain. This same epistemic authority would be retained by the possessor of the silicon chips just in case the chips generated the same end state. Even the designer of the robot would have no greater epistemic authority than Aunt Helen in declaring the creation to be conscious.

This is the well-known “first-person problem,” and it has attracted predictable attention over the centuries and long before Descartes took his turn. I do not take it as a problem, however, for I take it to be basic. To make my own position clearer, let me quote some lines from David Chalmers, with whom I am in close agreement on some but not all aspects of these knotty issues. Chalmers has written:

As I see it, the distinctive task of a science of consciousness is to systematically integrate two key classes of data into a scientific framework: third-person data about behavior and brain processes, and first-person data about subjective experience. When a conscious system is observed from the third-person point of view, a range of specific behavioral and neural phenomena present themselves. When a conscious system is observed from the first-person point of view, a range of specific subjective phenomena present themselves. I think both sorts of phenomena have the status of data for a science of consciousness.Is this either a distinctive task at all and, if so, is it the right task for “a science of consciousness”? One venerable specialty within medicine is clinical neurology, whose distinctive task is, indeed, connecting a patient’s subjective reports to the known functions of the nervous system. Were it not for the facts gleaned by clinicians in neurology there would be little reason for focusing on the brain at all! We are taunted by something called the mind-brain problem owing to the observed alterations in mental function associated with brain pathologies. Not to be merely argumentative, I should say that dentists, too, have as one distinctive task connecting the first-person reports of pain (and associated pain behavior) to x-ray data on the state of the dental nerves. Any number of symptoms of diseases of the nervous system can be produced by vitamin B12deficiency. Numbness in the hands may be sign of circulatory disorders, lactic acid formation from fatigue, muscle weakness, peripheral nerve damage, tumors in the brachial plexus, or anomalous conditions in the brain. The point, of course, is that many areas of medicine, dentistry, nursing, nutrition, physical therapy, and psychotherapy must attend to the relationship between “ third-person data about behavior and brain processes, and first-person data about subjective experience.”

I should think that relationships of this sort, important though they are and, as noted, venerably studied long before anyone ever thought of a “science of consciousness,” have very little to do with such a science. The forms of life made possible by consciousness are only tangentially captured by terms such as “subjective experience,” especially as these reach little beyond the rudiments of visual and auditory sensations. I should think that the distinctive task of a science of consciousness would be a credible and systematic account of the manner in which knowledge, desire, belief, and judgment come to be integrated into action plans by entities that have and that take an interest in themselves and in others. Put another way, the distinctive task pertains to what is distinctive about human life, which is not merely or primarily “subjective experience.” What is distinctive about it is its amenability to rhetorical sources of motivation, to desires grounded in moral precepts, to forms of art and play, belief and conviction, and hopes and intuitions, by which “behavior” rises to the level of personal responsibility.

Bound up with these considerations is a life that is irreducibly civic: not simply “social” in the sense of patterns of mutual influence but civic in the sense of regulative precepts, rules of law, of etiquette, of ethics. Such a life requires self-consciousness as a precondition for imputing standing to others. Civic life obliges one to take the part of another, to see the world or the setting or the problem as another is seeing it. Such a life calls for empathy, which, in the end, is a form of co-consciousness, an achievement of a developed, refined, and disciplinedconsciousness.Onlyunderthesedescriptionsarewholeclasses of behavior (e.g., “criminal,” “saintly,” “heroic,” “generous,” “envious”) intelligible as something other than muscle twitches.

The ancient world was not attentive to our problem of (or problem with) consciousness, for its two greatest philosophers were tentative in their ontologies, Plato rejecting materialism and Aristotle denying that natural science was “ultimate.” They were not attentive to our problem of (or problem with) consciousness for they did not regard the essence of rationality and mentation to be “subjective experience.” A psychology going little further in its inquiries than phantasmata would be taken as devoid of explanatory resources. They were not attentive to our problem of (or problem with) consciousness because they did not regard the central mission of philosophy to be the analysis of concepts. Analysis was understood as a tool, a method of clarifying words and notions so that substantive disagreements might be engaged. Within limits, their modes of analysis and their orientating assumptions were the gift of a folk psychology that has consciousness as its point of origin. It is that in virtue of which there might be problems of any sort!

Folk psychology in these respects just is the foundational science. I say this not to immunize village credulity and seasonless prejudice against the harsh light of scientific and logical assessment. To say that physics is the foundational science for all that is manifest in the form of matter and energy is not to say that physics at any point in its development is sound in its methods or correct in its core propositions. Identifying a discipline or field of inquiry as foundational is not an evaluation of its achievements but the identification of the scientific framework within which all facts of a given kind must find their systematic treatment. All the facts of consciousness, including those actions and experiences arising from it, have as the framework within which to be subjected to systematic treatment folk psychology. If that psychology is in a primitive state relative to its distinctive task, then it is that psychology that requires development and refinement, rather than being abandoned so that some other framework—for example, “cognitive neuroscience”—might be adopted with less frustration or embarrassment.

Does this conclusion force the tireless workers out of the laboratory and back into the armchair? The position one has as a vantage point must be chosen, not compelled. If Locke and Hume, Berkeley and Kant, Descartes and Plato (readers know how long a list might be composed here) regarded their own moral and intellectual lives as representative enough for the purpose of deriving a “science” of mental life, it would be rash to rule out their mode of inquiry. The prepared and serious mind reflecting on the nature of its own operations is not under some special burden of establishing its validity. Actually, it’s the other way round: a third-person account of my toothache is what bears the burden, and it bears it credibly only when it matches up very well with most toothaches. In that case, if it fails in my case, there would be grounds of suspecting me or my nervous system as in some possibly interesting way eccentric.

How much progress might be expected of those in armchairs— how much progress might be expected of those in laboratories— depends chiefly on just who is in each location. If advice might be useful coming from one who has labored earnestly in both vineyards, that of philosophical reflection and brain science, I would suggest that the “cognitive revolution” be medicated a bit, calmed down, given a pause to regain its sobriety, so that its practitioners might recover a less lofty place but one worthy of praise for its energy and occasionally insightful findings; viz., functional neuroanatomy, chiefly within the context of clinical neurology. As for the philosophers, it would appear advisable to resist the temptation to hyphenate our endearing if vexing subject. Brain function and mental life are connected, to be sure. So, too, is kidney function and mental life. I would no more be inclined toward “neurophilosophy” than “hepatophilosophy.” It is for others to end their declarative sentences with exclamation points. Ours should end with a semicolon;

****

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