The Partially Examined Life

I don’t think I’m a robot, but I’ll double check with my programmers.

I’m surprised that you don’t refer to David Chalmers’s book The Conscious Mind. He’s got some highly entertaining ideas about the mind/body problem, and seems to be a totally erudite philosopher. I like the arguments he makes for panpsychicism!
(Although I was sort of shocked to see his unconventional haircut and wacky clothes).

Hi –

Thanks for this podcast – I thought this was the best one so far (probably because I’m an IT Engineer not a philosopher

Someone implied that Dennett’s idea of the Cartesian theatre was a straw man and that no one believes in the homunculus… but I don’t quite follow that. Isn’t the Cartesian theatre exactly what any dualist *must* believe in because they have to draw a line somewhere and have information passing backwards and forwards between the body and the mind?

Another thing you started to touch on in the podcast was the problem of defining terms – what are “mind”, “thought”, “consciousness”, “intelligence” and “understanding” and how are they different? It sounds to me as if the Turing test is about “intelligence” and Searle’s Chinese Room argument is about “understanding”, and neither are about “consciousness” – so none of them directly relate to each other.

- Jon

I haven’t read all the literature on the Chinese room thought experiment, but what kept coming to mind was this;
If the person in the room sat there and read through all his/her notes in English and compared them to the symbols, he/she would begin to come to an understanding of what they are doing in the symbol manipulation by dint of “doing it”, or at the very least comparison. Eventually they would derive semantic meaning from the syntax. While some of their assumptions would be wrong, for the most part they would be right in gathering understanding through context.

Whether they get an understanding at the immediate moment of pushing out the symbol or from years of studying all the symbols by comparing to the English instructions the result is still the same, a blossoming of understanding. Wouldn’t this break down Searle’s assumption the person has no semantic understanding or does Searle leave some room for this learning curve? And if there is a learning curve made from doing symbool manipulation day in and day out, doesn’t that defeat the point he is making because this learning possibility is a criteria for consciousness?

Hi,
I was really looking forward to this episode and I was by turns infuriated and illuminated. I have some comments based upon my understanding of mainly psychology and neuroscience. I was interested in Wes’s defence of the Hard Problem and how it would never be solved. I think that the more neuroscience evolves the more that the Hard Problem would appear to be a category mistake (insofar as I understand the term).
My approach to this is as follows:
1. Neuropsychology has established that reported brain states are preceded by neuron firing (this includes reports of qualia, emotional states) I am unsure of the evidence regarding abstract thought.
2. The mind is correlated with neuron firing. To argue against this is to argue against anasthetics, head injuries, strokes etc whereby the mind and behaviour can be seen to relate to structural changes in the brain.
3. decisions that the mind makes are associated with deep level processing by the brain. This processing is an example of many brain ‘modules’ comparing inputs (sensory information) with memory. This is what the brain does and it’s processing involves billions of excitatory and inhibitory neurons involved in an enormous comparatory algorithm/s. I would argue that this process is always unconscious and a conscious decision is always a confabulation that the mind constructs after the fact. For example, when I go mountain biking if I am on an unfamiliar track which forks left or right I will make a decision to go left or right. When asked as to why I made a particular decision what can I answer? There was no deliberate decision, the process was made, motor neurons fired and my body went on the left or right path. If considering it later I will say that I chose. What I am really saying is that billions of neurons in several connected modules in the brain used sense data to compare against memory (ie twice before when choosing the uphill path I was able to slow down before hitting a rock; once before I took the downhill path nd ran into a dropoff at too much speed: causing an embarrasing and painful fall) therefore the calculus was made to turn uphill.
This occurs so fast that the body is moving towards one path before the awareness of the decision is constructed in the conscious mind (this has been demonstrated experimentally…just not on a bike). Therefore, any decision that is perceived consciously in this process is a confabulation.
In the case of a ‘conscious decision’, the same process occurs – for a mathematics problem MRI scans demonstrate that neuronal firing occurs in cognitive centres which correlates with the mental process.
4. Free will is part of this process: to choose something is to have the brain engage in an enormous comparative calculation with memory which occurs subconsciously – the mind can only ever perceive this as a decision that is made consciously as it has no access to unconscious processes- to say otherwise would be to say that mind ‘substance’ interacts with neuronal tissue physically but also temporally – that is, reaches back in time to enact the neuronal correlate. Surely, using ockahams razor, there is no need to construct a weird duality to explain the mind – it is a construct post hoc after neuronal firing. It doesn’t negate free will either – just because the brain computes unconsciously doesn’t mean the end of free will – it means changing your understanding of what free will is. If you don’t think that the computatitive power of billions of neurons enacting thousands of algorithms to compare a near infinite amount of possible outcomes is not free will then I’d like to see a better definition – it just moves the computation from a mysterious mind substance to an actual physical thing. If it offends your sensibilities than think of how beautiful this system is….
5. To explain dualism in decision making the mind must travel back in time to effect the neuronal firing . This would mean some pretty weird quantum smoke and mirrors. Why resort to this? Just accept that the mind occurs post hoc from neuronal firing. Remember that Descarte was religious and didn’t have to refer to reality or probability in his philosophy.
6. The mystery of what the mind ‘is’ … well this is, of course, a mystery and maybe this is what Wes refers to. Penrose postulated that that consciousness is a quantum effect steming from neuronal structures (cellular organelles called microtubules). This is clearly just a theory but I’d bet that the mind is more likely to be the result of an effect such as this than some quasi-religious “we can never know” statement. It might just be that our brains can not regard the problem – in the same way that that we cannot access our unconscious neuronal processes that create our mind.
7. If you still insist that your mind and brain are separate have a few glasses of wine and you’ll see how the mind is affected by physical processes. Furthermore, have a stroke and you’ll see how your mind cannot influence the brain. To see in yourself how you can be aware but not conscious throw your self out of a plane (with a parachute on) It is the only time I have experienced awareness with out any consciousness (self regard or reasoning power) it’s possible that some brain pathologies would also result in a loss of self regard without a loss in awareness and some strokes appear to do this.
To sum up I do think that mind/brain duality is a category mistake; because in the philosophical literature that I have seen the mind is viewed as a whole and is not reductive. The mind in neuroscience, psychology, medicine and neurology is reducible and can be seen to result from physical processes. In the end, I guess, whether there is a problem results from how you choose to think about it.

cheers for the reply, my post was hasty (which shows) a problem when you wake at 2 am thinking about this. I listened to the episode again (the third time!) and I read a lot more of this in detail and the more I read the more I’m convinced that philosophy skirts around the science and the less the science can explain the ‘what it is like to be’ problem. I guess my irritation about this subject lies in the fact that philosophy approaches problems very differently to science and clearly I approach this from a science based angle. Wes, I take your point about how philosophers take their points of view and now i am taking more of a humanities approach when reading the literature.

I do have a question after reading a few different accounts of the colour blind physicist – is this a problem of symbology not of knowledge? The argument goes that if the physicist knows everything about red then become colour sighted would give her more knowledge. I don’t think that the qualia ‘red’ is information. The information is supplied as the wavelength, the first time the brain registers this wavelength as a neuaral impulse it is stored permanently as a neural connection – that is the information (the knowledge if you will)…when the mind wishes to ‘imagine’ the colour by recall; or when the shade is seen again, the neural input is compared against the stored information. The qualia of red or grey (in the colourblind) is not information it is a symbol that stands for the information… in the same way that a geologist learns nothing more about rocks when he sees a warning sign on the road with a picture of rocks on the road. If the qualia of a colour is knowledge then think of the implications: I could show a subject the complete amount of wavelengths of light in the visible sprectrum in, lets say, 10 seconds by use of a dial that turns down the frequency of light from violet to red – does this mean that I have just exposed the subject to close to infinite knowledge? It is not possible for a finite brain to store as knowledge the amount of qualia that it is possible to experience.

So my contention is the knowledge is the stored wavelength (the redness module in the brain) the qualia is the brain comparing the input with the memory of red. In the colour blind scientist she accesses a new symbol for the information already stored in her brain and every time she sees red the new symbol stands for that stored wavelength. Is the symbol knowledge? To argue this is to say that when learning the german word for red (‘rot’, by the way) you gain more knowledge about the wavelength. I tried this out today and learnt the japanese word for red – it han’t changed my qualia and I would argue it hasn’t given me any more information about electromagnetic radiation. I haven’t seen an attack on the colurblind physicist argument anywhere so please let me know if I’ve presented a perfectly rotten argument that’s been discounted elsewhere. It is a question of semantics, I suppose; as to whether qualia is knowledge or not.

Anyway, thanks again for your time – I am now getting heavily immersed in reading over this topic from a philosophical bent rather than a psychological approach.