The nature of conscious minds

[The Black Jester]

At the close of his first popular success, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Antonio Damasio draws out what he considers to be the broad implications of his life's work in Neurology and Neuroscience.  I can do no better than to quote him:

   

"This is Descartes' error: the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body.  Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism....

    The facts I have presented about feelings and reason, along with others I have discussed about the interconnection between brain and body proper, support the most general idea with which I introduced the book: that the comprehensive understanding of the human mind requires an organismic perspective; that not only must the mind move from a nonphysical cogitum to the realm of biological tissue, but it must also be related to a whole organism possessed of integrated body proper and brain and fully interactive with a physical and social environment.

    The truly embodied mind I envision, however, does not relinquish its most refined levels of operation, those constituting its soul and spirit.  From my perspective, it is just that soul and spirit, with all their dignity and human scale, are now complex and unique states of an organism. (1994, pgs. 249, 251-252)"

And Descartes' Error, according to Damasio, is not merely that he introduced this chasm between res cogitans and res extensa, but that he had identified the "truest" self with the supposedly rational, disembodied thinking substance, and subjugated the body to it in the order of nature and in the order of importance.  But more and more we are coming to understand that to truly comprehend the mind, we must understand its constitution in the body, and moreover, the mutual contribution of traditionally separate sub-entities, such as feeling and reason, to each other's action.

Here is where controversy erupts, at least in philosophical circles.  Damasio, I would suspect knowingly, is making an audacious claim.  He is, in effect, claiming to have settled the ancient mind-body dilemma (although in the notes to his later work, The Feeling of What Happens, he acknowledges the ongoing controversy, perhaps in response to the backlash against his philosophic pretensions).

While there has been tremendous progress in our developing understanding of the neurology of consciousness (see Christof Koch's excellent book The Quest for Consciousness), a well known and stalwart band of fearless dissenters (Chalmers, Block, Levine, Nagel) has been holding out against claims that such a resolution has, in fact, been reached.  David Chalmers introduced the concept of The Hard Problem of consciousness to the public at large, in reference to the puzzle of how a physical system of any kind, describable primarily in 3rd person objective terms, could give rise to a subjective system capable of 1st person experience.  This is the latest restatement of the ancient "Qualia" problem: how can a brain (or body), which, when we examine it, contains nothing but nerves, nerve impulses, tissues, etc., be the same thing as a mind constituted by feels, smells, sights, sounds, and other things of a 1st person nature.  The nerve impulses correlated with the sight of a red rose look nothing like the sight of the red rose.  How can they be the same thing?

Such questions have always struck me as monumentally naive.  Certainly, when I look at a nerve impulse from the outside it will look nothing like the red rose to which it is a response.  But to properly interpret the impulse, it must not be looked at from the outside, but must be received by a properly constituted and specifically designed receptor, and be seen from the point of view of this receiving organ: i.e. from the point of view of the brain structures receiving the impulse.

This response does not convince many detractors.  Most of those who object to physicalism or materialism just insist that mind-stuff is too different from body-stuff.  After all, the body is extended in space, has location, and is divisible.  We do not primarily think of a thought as extended in space or having a location, although we may consider that a thought could be divisible into more basic constituent thoughts.  But this may all be the result of habitual patterns of conception.  One of the famous arguments against the idea of a heliocentric solar system regarded a logical objection to the idea of a moving Earth.  The objection simply observed that the concept of "movement" involved a change in position relative to the position of the earth.   And so how could the earth move relative to its own position?  Absurd!, went the cry.  But all this showed was that the traditional concept of motion was severely flawed.  Similarly, objections based on the ordinary conception of things do not strike me as terribly persuasive.  Just because we haven't traditionally thought of a "thought" as having a location, doesn't mean that it can't have one – only that our traditional concept may be incorrect.

Other prominent thinkers, seemingly, to me, to side-step the issue altogether, have claimed to be Neutral Monists, a kind of dual-aspect theory.  Which means, they don't believe there are two separate substances, there is only one substance, but it is neither a thinking nor a material substance.  It is more basic than that and subtends the mental and the physical.  The mental and physical are, in other words, properties of this substance – aspects of it.

Persuasive, but my response to dual aspect theory echos an observation made by Thomas Nagel himself,

"Though it has its attractions as a way of unifying the radically disparate elements that give rise to the mind-body problem, it also has the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory."

If it were true, it would suggest that every particle of this "neutral substance" should have mental aspects.  But, then, why does consciousness proper only appear to arise in a very, very small subset of that neutral material, namely that which is very, very specifically organized into neural systems.  And why should very, very specific aspects of consciousness be removed if specific brain regions are damaged?  If there is some kind of panpsychist, proto-consciousness in everything, wouldn't that argue for a more global materialization of consciousness – meaning, if a conscious entity does arise, shouldn't its consciousness, being made up of smaller bits of identical proto-consciousness, be divisible only into identical sub-bits?  Then why should only my ability to recognize faces be impacted if only my fusiform gyrus is damaged?

I introduce this topic via Damasio's book very puposefully.  His philosophical observations have been ridiculed among Philosophers proper, but what I want to explore is whether or not there are actually good grounds to do so.

What have been your thoughts on how consciousness materializes (pardon the use of the word), and of what it may be constructed, and why do you think the way you do?

[xSilverPhinx]

This is a very interesting topic, and I don't have much to say about it other than I think that the fact that we're not conscious of the processes that lead to our conscious awareness doesn't make things any easier.  

About Descartes, didn't he say that he considered his truest self to be the supposedly rational and disembodied thinking substance because that's the only thing that he could say for sure existed? I never thought of it as him actually rejecting monism...

[The Black Jester]

This is a very interesting topic, and I don't have much to say about it other than I think that the fact that we're not conscious of the processes that lead to our conscious awareness doesn't make things any easier.  

About Descartes, didn't he say that he considered his truest self to be the supposedly rational and disembodied thinking substance because that's the only thing that he could say for sure existed? I never thought of it as him actually rejecting monism...

He absolutely rejected monism: he is the quintessential Dualist, and not merely by reputation.  It the Meditations, he not only argued that the fact of conscious awareness must be the foundation for all knowledge, he argued strenuously that this substance must be different in quality and properties from matter.  At least...I'm PRETTY sure that's the case...

[The Black Jester]

Sigh.  So no one's biting. 

I suppose this might, for many, seem like a strange topic.  I've been immersed in Philosophy of Mind so long, it no longer seems odd to me that there should still be controversy over the place of the mind in nature.  My post might seem, from the outside, like saying there's still controversy in some circles over the existence of 'Caloric,' and then arguing strenuously that the 'Caloric' concept is wrong: irrelevant and about 100 years late to the scene.

Except it isn't. 

Many people still, while granting a correlative, or even causal, relationship between mind and brain, still insist that there are two things, not one: that there is no identity.  Particularly people of a religious or spiritual bent.  'Consciousness' is the last refuge of the 'spirit' and of the 'transcendental' and if materialists are to banish these terms entirely, they need to give an account of consciousness in strictly material terms.  It may seem that this has already been done - but many philosophers, at least, disagree.  Which may, of course, seem to do nothing but prove the irrelevance of Philosophy. 

In one Phil of Mind class I took, a participant in the course who was a Neurologist by trade, a neurologist, mind you, insisted that the mind could not be reduced to the brain.  When someone made the claim that the mind simply was the brain, he retorted, "Tell me, please, how 3 lbs of meat is 'you'."

So the resistance to the expulsion of this mental "caloric" is still great. 

...aaaand now I'm arguing with myself...

[Davin]

I don't have a problem just reading what you're typing, but I haven't had the time to read the stuff you cited. Give me a few weeks and I'll read Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and maybe some of the other stuff too.

Where I stand right now is that I think consciousness is a combination of lots of smaller parts... but all the parts are physical things. I'm attached to that concept enough to speculate, but not enough to defend it (mostly because I have forgotten the sources I would cite in support of it).

[xSilverPhinx]

Sigh.  So no one's biting.  

I suppose this might, for many, seem like a strange topic.  I've been immersed in Philosophy of Mind so long, it no longer seems odd to me that there should still be controversy over the place of the mind in nature.  My post might seem, from the outside, like saying there's still controversy in some circles over the existence of 'Caloric,' and then arguing strenuously that the 'Caloric' concept is wrong: irrelevant and about 100 years late to the scene.

Except it isn't.  

Many people still, while granting a correlative, or even causal, relationship between mind and brain, still insist that there are two things, not one: that there is no identity.  Particularly people of a religious or spiritual bent.  'Consciousness' is the last refuge of the 'spirit' and of the 'transcendental' and if materialists are to banish these terms entirely, they need to give an account of consciousness in strictly material terms.  It may seem that this has already been done - but many philosophers, at least, disagree.  Which may, of course, seem to do nothing but prove the irrelevance of Philosophy.  

In one Phil of Mind class I took, a participant in the course who was a Neurologist by trade, a neurologist, mind you, insisted that the mind could not be reduced to the brain.  When someone made the claim that the mind simply was the brain, he retorted, "Tell me, please, how 3 lbs of meat is 'you'."

So the resistance to the expulsion of this mental "caloric" is still great.  

...aaaand now I'm arguing with myself...

Is caloric sort of like what emerges from the brain?

I think maybe why people see the two as separate is not that they aren't separate in some software/hardware like way, but that then they go on to say things such as the mind can then be disembodied and is independent from the brain and those types of unfounded assumptions.

I wouldn't consider myself to be a dualist, but I wouldn't say that the mind is not separate in some way from the brain just as software is from hardware. But the fact that it's dependent on the brain and portions of neural networks is indisputable.  

[The Magic Pudding]

...aaaand now I'm arguing with myself...

Yes but you are doing a very good job of it, I think you're winning.

I like the idea of having my mind moved to a more reliable form of media, a distributed computer system maybe.  I wouldn't like it done all at once, that would just seem like a copy and I'd be left to deteriorate.  I think I'll have to do it gradually, live in both places for a while.  After a while I hope to become comfortable without my 3lbs of meat.

[xSilverPhinx]

...aaaand now I'm arguing with myself...

Yes but you are doing a very good job of it, I think you're winning.

LOL

[The Black Jester]

Yay!  Responses!  Thanks guys!

Give me a few weeks and I'll read Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and maybe some of the other stuff too.

That's great, I'd love to hear what you think of it if you are able to find the time to read it!  And if you find yourself interested in the topic, I can recommend lots of other references, books, and papers on both the neurology of consciousness and philosophy of mind.

Where I stand right now is that I think consciousness is a combination of lots of smaller parts... but all the parts are physical things. I'm attached to that concept enough to speculate, but not enough to defend it (mostly because I have forgotten the sources I would cite in support of it).

I believe there is actually a good amount of research to back-up the modular model of consciousness.  Christof Koch's book, previously mentioned, is actually specifically about the Neural Correlates of visual consciousness, which he locates in the upper reaches of the Ventral Stream (the flow of neural information through the ventral areas of the visual system, including the Infero Temporal Cortex).  There would of course have to be some neural system responsible for integrating the various nexuses of different regions of consciousness, since we experience consciousness as a singlar, unified event.  Not sure if there is solid research on that process, however.

Is caloric sort of like what emerges from the brain?  

No, "caloric" was the term used to designate the hypothesized substance inherent in everything that was the medium of the flow of heat.  It was alternately described as a fluid or a gas that flowed from hotter to colder objects.  Each object was supposed to have a certain amount of it, and when, for example, friction was applied, 'caloric' was thought to flow from the object as heat.  This was of course before heat was identified with mean molecular kinetic energy (actually, that's temperature, but the two are of course related).

I was using 'caloric' as an analog to 'spirit' or 'consciousness' - in the way that caloric was an extra posited substance that was later found to be unnecessary and erroneous in the theory of thermodynamics, now outmoded, it could be argued that 'mind' is a superfluous and unnecessary term in a proper theory of consciousness.

I think maybe why people see the two as separate is not that they aren't separate in some software/hardware like way, but that then they go on to say things such as the mind can then be disembodied and is independent from the brain and those types of unfounded assumptions.

I wouldn't consider myself to be a dualist, but I wouldn't say that the mind is not separate in some way from the brain just as software is from hardware. But the fact that it's dependent on the brain and portions of neural networks is indisputable.  

The software/hardware idea of conciousness has some strong defenders, most notably certain of the Functionalists, who insist that it is not the substrate that is important, but the functions performed by the substrate that gives rise to consciousness.

...aaaand now I'm arguing with myself...

Yes but you are doing a very good job of it, I think you're winning.

I like the idea of having my mind moved to a more reliable form of media, a distributed computer system maybe.  I wouldn't like it done all at once, that would just seem like a copy and I'd be left to deteriorate.  I think I'll have to do it gradually, live in both places for a while.  After a while I hope to become comfortable without my 3lbs of meat.

There is a great essay by the Philosopher Daniel Dennett that your idea of slow conversion to artificial intelligence reminds me of - let me know if you're interested and I'll dig up the title...

[Rizuidad]

I don't have much time left on the computer, so I can't put up my entire theory of the mind, which I've mapped out in great detail myself. But I will say that to me, philosophers of the mind are like chickens with their heads cut off. They wave their arms around in little circles, and then call that doing something important. To me, most  of their work is fluff, as nothing that they say seems to have any practical application.

For a theory of mind to be correct, it has to have practical applications. And for that to happen, it has to conform correct to predictions. I've yet to see any philosopher even come closer to doing anything of the sort. Hence the mindless fluff.

Please, don't confuse me with being pedantic. I have a system that could use some testing.

[penfold]

Well its called the hard problem for a reason...

Here's my problem with the materialist account.

It seems to me that the materialist has two options. Either Descartes' res cogitans really is a species of res extensa. Or the res cogitans has to be seen as an emergent property of res extensa.

My problem with the former is that the two most fundamental properties of the material world, temporal/spacial extension and atomic characteristics are not apparent of mental states. Any attempt at rendering the mental commensurable, will inevitably involve reference to a material correlate (eg and fMRI). This clearly begs the question.

My problem with the latter is really one of definition. What does it mean for consciousness to be an 'emergent' property of the material? Clearly we would have to concede that the relationship is not causal (as any effect has equal claim to existence with the cause). The relationship between the material and emergent property of consciousness must, therefore, be concurrent. However, the materialist, wants the material to be ontologically prior to consciousness, ie the relationship must be asymmetric. This then is a queer relationship indeed, being both concurrent and asymmetrical (in ontic terms). I cannot think of any 'real world' examples of concurrent and asymmetric relationships. It seems to me that all examples of 'real world' priority are ultimately temporal (which would include causal and mereological priority as well). So if consciousness is an emergent property of the material, we still have a huge amount of explanation and justification to show the priority of the material, before this seems really satisfying.