Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of C

[DwayneHoover]

Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/08...pf_rd_t=3201&pf_rd_p=1280661782&pf_rd_i=typ01

"An accessible and compelling exploration of the extended mind"

From Booklist
The notion that consciousness is confined to the brain, like software in a computer, has dominated science and philosophy for close to two centuries. Yet, according to this incisive review of contemporary neuroscience from Berkeley philosopher Nöe, the analogy is deeply flawed. In eight illuminating, mercifully jargon-free chapters, he defines what scientists really know about consciousness and makes a strong case that mind and awareness are processes that arise during a dynamic dance with the observer’s surroundings. Nöe begins with a sharp critique of scientists, such as DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick, who insist that nothing but neurons determines our daily perceptions and sense of self. He then examines studies of human and animal behavior that demonstrate an inextricable link between identity and environment. Nöe regrettably limits his treatise by ignoring considerable research from transpersonal psychology suggesting that consciousness transcends physicality altogether. Still, the resulting book is an invaluable contribution to cognitive science and the branch of self-reflective philosophy extending back to Descartes’ famous maxim, “I think, therefore I am.” --Carl Hays

 

[DwayneHoover]

I know I know. This post is about a book and not about a psychedelic drug. Still, I can't help feeling this really really belongs here.

 

[Flickering]

Probably better suited for Philosophy and Spirituality though.

I have an inkling that consciousness is not limited to the brain, but rather, the brain creates a very complex vessel through which consciousness experiences itself as a stable mass of meat. Ideally, consciousness would continue to experience itself beyond the death of the body. But I don't know. I certainly think the materialist worldview so many people take for granted is inherently biased and flawed through assumptions and the grand contradiction of qualia. All that said, I'm dubious towards books like these. "Jargon-free" just makes it sound like it hasn't properly investigated the scientific arguments and studies about the brain and consciousness; it's all presented to convince the layman. I could be wrong, and one way or another, it looks worth checking out.

 

[lulzkiller]

This book, or others by Alva Noe regularly pop up on my "you might be interested in this as well"-thing on Amazon. Haven't read it yet. I think I agree with what appears to be Noe's main criticism of much cognitive science: you can't just expect to look at the brain as something isolated from the surroundings, especially social matters.
However, as much as I'm for the "social" and "embodied" turns in cognitive science, I still believe that what we are is ultimately instantiated in the nervous systems (and to a lesser extent the body), even if it doesn't make sense to look at the brain without taking into account that its organisation must have been influenced to a great extent by environmental/social factors. (so I sort of agree with the reviewer)

Some of you might find the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger's "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self" pretty interesting. It's intended for lay readers as well plus he investigates some pretty fucking cool phenomena, including but not limited to: lucid dreaming, empirical investigations of where the self resides (through virtual reality - published in an article in Science), psychedelic drugs (not many real philosophers mention 2C-T-7 in their books, lay or not), lucid dreaming.

Edit: More real philosophers, less Leary in PD ! (They don't have to be neuro-computationalist eliminativist physicalist no-folk-psychology types)

 

[uncle stinky]

if i can borrow the following instructive example from Daniel Dennett. Imagine that you had a brain tumour. The oncologist comes in to see you with the good news of a cure for your cancer. It's a brain transplant. I suspect you would swiftly modify views regarding conscsiousness inhering elsewhere than the brain? At least not in a way you can use without the big bit in the centre

 

[sekio]

Conciousness is a "hard problem" indeed. I think that between the Chinese Room problem, the Ship of Theseus problem, and the whole brain-in-a-vat thing that it's pretty safe to say that humans are simply monkeys that got really good at logic and reasoning, and conciousness is just a set of organized electrical activities that comprise a state machine. Dualistic belief in 'souls' or some sort of mystical 'life force' is silly to me.

 

[DwayneHoover]

conciousness is just a set of organized electrical activities that comprise a state machine. Dualistic belief in 'souls' or some sort of mystical 'life force' is silly to me.

How, exactly, do electrons jumping around between nerve cells "generate" the subjective Point Of View that we call "consciousness"? WHERE are impresisons (or "Qualia") located in the phsical world? "Inside" of nerve cells? "Inside" of the electrons leaping about in the brain? HOW?WHY? This is just as much magical thinking as that which you decry with oversimplified shallow assumptions.

WHAT, exactly, is *EXPERIENCING* these physical phenomena, and having the "impression" of "what it feels like" to be a consciousness?

You are just brushing these unanswerable questions under the carpet like all the other hard-core physicalists, admiring your "hard boiled" realism, IMHO.

Look up "Qualia" and "Hard Problem." Some decent summaries on wikipedia. All the physical aspects are just elements of the Easy Problem, which David Chalmers does away with in his definition of The Hard Problem here: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

Its inevitable, every time one tries to discuss The Hard Problem everyone goes back continuously to The Easy Problem. The mystery is: WHY does a bunch of chemicals and electrons and energy flow (i.e., a BRAIN) have SOMETHING THAT IT FEELS LIKE TO "BE" IT??? WHERE is this subjective experience located... what is it REALLY?

We have no basis on which to understand this. Seems like something OUTSIDE of the modeling system we utilize and we may be too "close" to "what it really is" for us to EVER be able to model or understand it in scientific terms.

I find a pan-psychic view that Consciousness is a fundamental property inherent in the universe like Mass, etc. unifies MANY things and answers alot of mysteries, such as where the hell the weird consciousness-dependent and non-local properties of quantum mechanics comes from. And before you say "quantum stuff is too small to affect biology" *WRONG* There are scientific studies proving that quantum processes are responsible for photosynthesis, bird magnetic migration, and other bio-phenomenon. DNA given enough time and processing iterations was able to "capture" and use consciousness from the universal omnipresent background as a survival tool, exactly like it was able to harness "light" as another survival tool. To suggest that DNA somehow "invented" consciousness as some kind of trick our brains do is as absurd as believing that DNA "invented" light. DNA just discovered how to HARNESS all these things as tools to increase survival of its carrying organism.

If the entire universe is really some sort of process happening inside of a vast promordial "primal consciousness" (i.e., it's all some kind of immense dream being dreamt by something we can never really know) then many of these unanswerable questions actually answer themselves. There is no need to come up with some speculative rube-goldberg hand-waving about how atoms and molecule "generate" awareness, because at the ultimate level, it's really the other way around... that's why we have such a hard time even conceptualizing such things in a physicallist appriach... it's totally got everything back-asswards, haha!

 

[DwayneHoover]

Guys, how does memory work? I searched but couldn't really find an answer. Maybe google just wasn't cooperating.

HAHA! That's a good one. Here's the answer: THEY HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA. Sure we know more than we used to. But consciousness and memory are WAAAAAY beyond our understanding. we are like dabbling babling infants in these areas, still.

 

[Psychodelirium]

if i can borrow the following instructive example from Daniel Dennett. Imagine that you had a brain tumour. The oncologist comes in to see you with the good news of a cure for your cancer. It's a brain transplant. I suspect you would swiftly modify views regarding conscsiousness inhering elsewhere than the brain? At least not in a way you can use without the big bit in the centre

But here's an instructive thought experiment from Hans Moravec.

Imagine that nanobots occupy your brain and start shutting down your neurons 1 by 1. The nanobots are able to perfectly simulate the computational activity of every neuron that they shut down and to replace its role in the network of your brain, which is in fact what they do. Eventually the activity of the nanobots will have completely replaced the activity of all of your neural tissue and you will have become, so to speak, brain dead. And yet it seems reasonable to suppose that at no point during this process will you have lost consciousness or even noticed that anything has changed. So where is your consciousness now?

 

[DwayneHoover]

It would be in the PATTERN of electrical and/or quantum activity that the neurons OR nanobots are causing to happen. But that analogy is just a clever conceptual trick that makes you FEEL like you have explained "where" consciousness exists in the universe but really has explained nothing, just shifted away the true question.

Unless you are suggesting the ELECTRICITY ITSELF is by some unexplained magic "consciousness itself", this analogy begs the question: WHY DOES A CERTAIN PATTERN OF ENERGY EXCHANGE "CAUSE" A SUBJECTIVE INNER CONSCIOUSNESS TO POP INTO BEING? And in what ontological space does the conscious that "comes into being" as a reult of the electical patterns exist?

You see, a "pattern" is a ABSTRACT CONCEPT. There is no reason why random pattern A should any more generate an inner subjective experience than random pattern B. Without an awareness that PERCEIVES/EXPERIENCES the pattern, then it is just a meaningless dead assembleage of stuff. It has no power to do anything, except somehow cause a response in some other physical system.

So WHAT is percieving and responding to the special electrical pattern that the neurons/nanobots are producing, and is thereby calling forth into being the subjective impressions we directly experiece? The QUALIA. Where is the experience of "redness" located at? A tree that falls in a forest causes air vibrations, but if there is nothing there to percieve them as a subjective expierience of some sort, then there is no "sound," just a bunch of wiggling molecules.

Same with the pattern of activity in our brains. There MUST be some other layer of some sort, probably beyond our linguistic comprehension, IN WHICH THE PATTERN CAUSES SUBJECTIVE QUALIA TO COME INTO BEING. Now if you tell me that the subjective qualia are just some ghostlike illusion that does not really exist, not only have you argued yourself out of existence (thus rendering your arguments specious, the mutterings of a noone who exists nowhere) but you have not explained this: WHAT/WHO IS EXPERIENCING THIS SUPPOSED "ILLUSION OF A SUBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS" that the activity has somehow mysteriously generated? In WHAT MEDIUM has it generated the illusion of qualia? An illusion is a PERCEPTION of something. So then what is percieving the illusion... what exactly is experiencing the pattern as a "consciousness", instead of just utter blank nothingness?

 

[PippUK]

Shucks. . . I love this kinda stuff. Ultimately difficult concepts, inconceivably counter-intuitive vibes with profound unknowables and the peril of infinite regress.
Peace - Pipp

 

[Psychodelirium]

Dwayne, I agree that consciousness is pretty weird. I just think that "consciousness is pattern" is a lot closer to the truth than "consciousness is meat".

It is indeed weird that the universe contains not just things but also perspectives and appearances. But I also find both the typical formulation of "the hard problem" and the panpsychist solution to it pretty weak. The problem with these positions is that by abstracting from consciousness all of the functional meat and potatoes that are addressed by the brain sciences, they arrive at something so ephemeral that it seems to have no relation to my actual experience of my subjectivity.

My experience of my subjectivity has structure and function and I know that the structure and function of my subjective experience is lawfully related to the structure and function of my brain, to my environment, the evolutionary history of my genotype, and so on and so forth. "What it's like to be me" causally depends on and is (at least partially) explained by these things. Attention, memory, self-awareness, abstract reasoning, sensory perception, emotions - all of these things are the way they are because of the way the physical organism is. What is consciousness without these things? I'm not sure it is a coherent concept.

"The hard problem" to me is a problem of ontology. I.e. how/why is it that being itself is split into insides and outsides? Is it really so split or does it only appear this way to us because of our limited cognitive capacities? But I'm not sure that these are scientific questions. I think the whole concept of qualia is a red herring. Either qualia have some functional role in the behavior of the organism or they do not. If they do then they have direct causal effects in the physical world and can be investigated by 3rd person brain science. If they don't (i.e. they are epiphenomenal) then I don't understand how it is possible to even refer to them. Presumably when you talk about qualia, it is your experience of your qualia that is causing you to talk about them. But if qualia are epiphenomenal, then they cannot be causing you to report them, and your talking (or thinking) about them has nothing to do with whether you actually experience them or not. This seems like a fatal problem to me.

 

[johannes kreisler]

didn' read the whole thread but "mind and awareness are processes that arise during a dynamic dance with the observer’s surroundings." is a good one. never thought of the problem in that way...

ad memory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation

 

[Solipsis]

Fine I will let it linger in PD for a bit, but it does belong in another part of the forum eventually. Especially after our resident PDers have had their way with it.

 

[TheAppleCore]

Unless you are suggesting the ELECTRICITY ITSELF is by some unexplained magic "consciousness itself", this analogy begs the question: WHY DOES A CERTAIN PATTERN OF ENERGY EXCHANGE "CAUSE" A SUBJECTIVE INNER CONSCIOUSNESS TO POP INTO BEING? And in what ontological space does the conscious that "comes into being" as a reult of the electical patterns exist?

It seems to me that you are asking for the constitution of consciousness -- the building blocks of consciousness itself. I think that, in order to make any progress on this front, we need to first establish a mutually recognized definition of consciousness.

I was sitting here for the longest time, asking myself, "When I say the word 'consciousness', what exactly am I referring to? What do I intend to communicate when I say that word?" The only answers that came up seemed to be expressed in terms that were equally ambiguous and vague, such as "perception", "self", "knowledge", etc. What exactly makes me think that these terms are ambiguous or vague anyway? What is "ambiguity" itself, in this context? What is a "definition" of a term? Isn't that just a bunch of other terms? How useful can language and symbols be, ultimately? What IS a "symbol"? Etc., ad infinitum. 8(