Since the publication of The Embodied Mind (1991), the cognitive sciences have been turning away from the mind-as-program analogy that dominated early cognitivism towards a conception of cognitive functioning as embodied in a living organism and embedded in an environment. In the past few years, important contributions to embodied-embedded cognitive science can be found in Noe (Action in Perception), Chemero (Radical Embodied Cognitive Scie Rnce), Thompson (Mind in Life), Clark (Being There and Surfing Uncertainty), and Wheeler (Reconstructing the Cognitive World).
[A note on terminology: the new cognitive science was initially called “enactivism” because of how the cognitive functions of an organism enact or call forth its world-for-it. This lead to the rise of “4E cognitive science — cognition as extended, embedded, embodied, and enacted. At present the debate hinges on whether embodied-embedded cognitive science should dispense with the concept of representation in explaining cognitive function. Wheeler and Clark drop “enaction” because they retain an explanatory role for representation, even though representations are action-oriented and context-sensitive.]
The deeper philosophical background to “the new cognitive sciences” includes Hubert Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and J. J. Gibson (who was taught by one of William James’s students). It is a striking fact that embodied-embedded cognitive science promises to put an anti-Cartesian, anti-Kantian critique of intellectualism on an scientific (empirical and naturalistic) basis. Embodied-embedded cognitive science is a fruitful place where contemporary cognitive science meets with the best (in my view) of 19th- and 20th-century Eurocentric philosophy.
That’s important for anyone who thinks, with Peirce, that science has some uniquely epistemic position because scientific practices allow the world to get a vote in what we say about it (Peirce contra Rorty).
The philosophical implications of embodied-embedded cognitive science are quite fascinating and complicated. Here’s one I’ve been thinking about the past few days: embodied-embedded cognitive science can strengthen Kant’s critique of both rationalist metaphysics and empiricist epistemology.
Kant argues that objectively valid judgments (statements that can have a truth-value in some but not all possible worlds) require that concepts (rules of possible judgment) be combined with items in a spatio-temporal framework. But Kant was never able to explain how this “combination” happened; and as a result subsequent philosophers were tempted to either reduce concepts to intuitions (as in Mill’s psychologistic treatment of logic) or reduce intuitions to concepts (as in the absolute idealism of Fichte and Hegel). As C. I. Lewis and Sellars rightly saw, however, neither Mill nor Hegel could be right. Somehow, receptivity and spontaneity are both required and they must somehow be combined (at least some degree). But how?
Andy Clark’s “predictive processing” model of cognition (in Surfing Uncertainty) offers a promising option. According to Clark, we should not think of the senses as passively transmitting information to the brain; rather, the brain is constantly signaling to the senses what to expect from the play of energies across receptors (including not only exteroceptive but also interoceptive and proprioceptive receptors). The task of the senses is to convey prediction errors — to indicate how off the predictions were so that the predictions can be updated.
And this bidirectional flow of information takes place between any different levels of neuronal organization — there’s top-down and sideways propagation from the ‘higher’ neuronal levels and also bottom-up propagation from the ‘lower’ neuronal levels (including, most distally, the receptors themselves).
Now, here’s the key move: the bidirectional multilevel hierarchy of neuronal assemblies matches (but also replaces) the Kantian distinction between the understanding (concepts) and the sensibility (intuitions). And it explains the one major thing that Kant couldn’t explain: how concepts and intuitions can be combined in judgment. They are combinable in judgment (at the personal level) because they have as their neurocomputational correlates different directions of signal propagation (at the subpersonal level).
But if embodied-embedded cognitive science allows to see what was right in Kant’s high-altitude sketch of our cognitive capacities, and also allows us to vindicate that sketch in terms of empirical, naturalistic science, it also thereby strengthens both Kant’s critique of empiricism (because top-down signal propagation is necessary for sense receptors to extract any usable information about causal structure from energetic flux), and his critique of rationalism (because the proper functioning of top-down signal propagation is geared towards successful actions, and our only source of information about whether our predictions are correct are not is the bottom-up prediction errors).
And because we can understand, now, both spontaneity and receptivity in neurocomputational terms as two directions of information flow across a multilevel hierarchy, we can see that Kant, C. I. Lewis, and Sellars were correct to insist on a distinction between spontaneity and receptivity, but wrong about how to understand that distinction — and we can also see that Hegel and neo-Hegelians like Brandom and McDowell are wrong to deny that distinction.
Aga, this is one of the funniest things I’ve read in weeks! 🙂 Thanks, KN.
Wow, this shows why ‘philosophy’ in the USA nowadays mostly sucks. It’s philosophistry pretending to be profound and relevant when it’s really not. Drop a few (no, a lot = 21) more or less ‘famous’ names as if that validates you. Use a bunch of esoteric jargon. And voila! – it perhaps sounds like you’re an enlightened thinking person, when really you’re a shallow shell of a human being shrouded by atheism in darkness.
And look, now we’ve got new ideologies – intellectualism, psychologism and cognitivism – to deal with! 🙁
KN seems to have been enjoying the new ‘high-altitude’ laws in D.C. while making such grandiose philosophistic claims as those demonstrated in this post. Atheists of TA/SZ, come to his philosophist’s rescue, won’t you please?
Embodied-embedded cognitive science also strengthens the argument for Kantian radical agnosticism:
(1) All objectively valid claims — all claims that could be true or false — are either a posteriori or a priori;
(2) The classical theistic conception of God is an infinite, unchanging, eternal, necessarily existing Being or Ground of Being that is simultaneously Being, Mind, and Love all at once (here I’m assuming that Hart is basically right about what the tradition states in The Experience of God);
(3) Finite measurements are the epistemic ground-floor of all a posteriori claims;
(4) But it is impossible to understand how there could be a finite measurement of such a Being, since we cannot take measurements outside of the Universe as a whole;
(5) So there cannot be any a posteriori evidence for or against the existence of God;
(6) All a priori claims are either analytic (e.g. logic) or synthetic (e.g. mathematics).
(7) No analytic a priori claim can establish existence-claims, since all such arguments only test for consistency within a set of freely and arbitrarily stipulated definitions;
(8) All synthetic a priori claims establish existence-claims only relative to a freely and arbitrarily stipulated conceptual system;
(9) But metaphysical claims transcend the limits of any conceptual system, so there can be no stipulated conceptual system for establishing metaphysical claims as synthetic a priori existence claims;
(10) So there are neither analytic a priori nor synthetic a priori claims sufficient to establish the existence or nonexistence of God
(11) So there cannot be any a priori demonstration of God;
(12) Hence, there are no objectively valid claims about God — the claim that “God exists” is neither true nor false.
That said, I do think that Kantian radical agnosticism is fully consistent with Kantian natural piety, or as Robert Hanna puts it:
———————————————————————–
Because I am taking Kant’s transcendental idealism to be a real, and in particular, an empirically realistic metaphysics of nature, and not merely epistemology, it follows with synthetic a priori necessity that space, time, quantity, movement, organismic life and natural teleology, consciousness, feeling and emotion, aesthetic form including beauty and sublimity, and morality, are all manifestly real, ontologically basic structures in the natural world of human experience.
The Kantian-Romantic-British-emergentist philosophical doctrine of natural piety, as I understand it, then, counsels a radically agnostic, empirically realistic, and metaphysically sane (where the criteria of metaphysical sanity are determined by Kant’s critique of modal metaphysics), aesthetically-sensitive and ethically-sensitive, and above all anti-mechanistic, non-reductive, non-dualist, primitivist approach to investigating nature, that is pro-science but not scientistic, by virtue of knowing the inherent scope and limits of natural-scientific investigation.
Natural piety, in turn, as a thesis in real metaphysics and also as an aesthetic, emotional, life-guiding, action-guiding attitude towards manifest nature, is intended as an essential corrective to the epistemic and metaphysical arrogance, and also to the aesthetic insensitivity and military-industrial authoritarianism, of the noumenally realistic epistemology and metaphysics, and of the corresponding “lordship and mastery of nature” ideology, that is explicitly or implicitly adopted by Bacon, by Descartes, by The Vienna Circle, and by recent and contemporary scientific naturalists, including most if not all proponents of Analytic metaphysics.
Indeed, the real-metaphysical-thesis-and-life-guiding-attitude of natural piety gives a rich sense to the radical poet Muriel Rukeyser’s deep insight that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
————————————————————————
As I see it, then, embodied-embedded cognitive science — especially Andy Clark’s version, but also drawing on Wheeler and Noe, offers us a subpersonal-level, neurocomputational correlate, in rerum natura, of Kantian personal-level distinction between the spontaneity of the understanding and the receptivity of sensibility, and in doing so, also:
(1) Bolsters the Kantian distinction between conceptual content and nonconceptual content, thereby rescuing Kant from both Hegel’s rejection of nonconceptual content and from the empiricist rejection of a priori conceptual content;
(2) Strengthens Kantian radical agnosticism about a priori metaphysics (whether Scholastic, rationalistic, or contemporary analytic);
(3) Allows us to see that empiricism why almost right as a theory of epistemic significance but fatally wrong as a theory of semantic content;
(4) Makes room for Kantian-Romantic natural piety;
(5) Accommodates the Hegel-Peirce insight into the historicity of conceptual frameworks, which in turn is the final nail in the coffin of the Eleatic quest for eternal verities that runs from Parmenides through Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and even Kant himself;
(6) Shows why Sellars was right to insist that transcendental structures must be reflected in causal structures (even though he was wrong about what the relevant causal structures are);
(7) And also shows how to think correctly about the differences between rational minds and non-rational minds, and thereby allows us to understand how rational mindedness could have emerged within a branch of the hominid evolutionary trajectory;
(8) And finally, thereby, showing us how to understand the place of humanity, culture, art, science, and religion within the natural world without any risk of either mechanism, disenchantment, reductionism, and scientism or supernaturalism, dogmatic theology, and merely speculative a priori metaphysics disconnected from epistemology and philosophical anthropology.
Gregory,
A complete ignorance of the history of Western philosophy, philosophy of mind, and empirical cognitive science on your part is not a sign of sophistry on my part.
I’m actually doing philosophy. If you don’t like what I’m doing, that’s not my problem. All that heckling does is indicate what a truly mean-spirited, petty, and ultimately pathetic person you are.
You might think I’m engaged in “philosophistry,” but I’d rather be a “philosophist” than be anything at all like you.
Ha. Sorry KN, I have to laugh that your post called up Gregory. Summoning demons, are you?
RIght before I opened this site, I was reading a violent vampire story. I was surprised at the plot turn when the heroine opens her boss’s office door: smoke alarms are blaring, curtains open, sun streaming in, and nothing but a pile of ash remaining on the floor. (I forgot, or never knew, that legend says sunshine not only kills vampires but burns them completely to ash.) Oh, it’s ridiculous, even within the genre, because the boss is a known character whom we’ve seen elsewhere, in a different story, on Bart’s hospital rooftop in broad daylight — he can’t be a vampire in this universe, at least not one who is disintegrated by sunshine.
But for some reason now I can’t help myself wondering if it’s after sunset where Gregory is while he stalks and hates you. 🙁
I want to make a real response to your post. Sorry, will have to wait until after I’ve restored my blood sugar and caffeine level.
Well, yes, there is some turning away from mind-as-program. However, the idea of mind as program didn’t just come from nowhere. It’s a natural consequence of particular ways of thinking. And those ways of thinking are still every much present, even in the folk who are turning away from mind-as-program.
It those ways of thinking that are the problem in cognitive science (and in philosophy).
I know, right? I mean, he seems to look ok (in clothes, anyway), but who the hell really knows with all that shroud going on.
KN –
Thanks for your thoughtful post.
I’d include Jerome Bruner’s “Acts of Meaning” as a significant critique of strictly computational approaches to cognitive science.
Probably 80-90%, certainly over 50% of TA/SZ posters actively mock philosophy. Yet here is atheist KN pumping up a jargonistic dehumanising ‘philosophistry’ for their happy-clappy blogger consumption. That’s about as serious or significant as it seems to get here. 😉
“Sellars was right…Sellars was right…Sellars was right…Sellars was right…Sellars was right…Sellars was right…Sellars was right…Sellars was right…Sellars was right…Sellars was right…Sellars was right…” – Chime it with KN (Sell-ars-Outist)
KN has the childish audacity to pretend to honour Hart, while nevertheless not actually believing him. It’s like he enjoys tricking himself as if he were a believer in something significant when in fact he’s a disenchanted apostate. Sad story unveiled.
Note: I don’t hate KN. (Echo for the atheist deaf!) Showing his worldview (which includes more ideologies than you can shake a stick at!), which he seems not even to know himself, but which is visible in his comments, however, is simply open communication.
No, you’re just paid to justify the ‘thought’ you call atheist-secularism.
Is calling people out on their bullshit dehumanising pseudo-philosophical idiocy some kind of intellectual crime at TA/SZ?! 🙂
Is this as high as TA/SZ can go – horizontal misanthropic quackery!?
So, shall we count the number of names KN drops per paragraph, as if that validates his soulless philosophistry at TA/SZ?
Essentialists are not Kantians. Nor do they accept the standard position, which associates necessity exclusively with apriority, and contingency exclusively with what is a posteriori. Essentialists have a radically new category: the necessary a posteriori.
– Brian Ellis. The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism
Would you mind being more explicit about what “those ways of thinking” are? I’d rather not take a guess at what you have in mind.
Gregory,
Do you have any substantive criticisms to offer of KN’s OP?
Thank you for that suggestion. I’ve not read Bruner but it seems interesting and relevant to my interests. I myself take a philosophy of culture from Cassirer, Morton White, and Joe Margolis.
A long time ago I read Merlin Donald’s Origins of the Modern Mind. In the Preface he talks about how he was influenced by the the need to connect what’s happening at the cultural level with what’s happening at the neurobiological level. That’s what I’ve been trying to understand myself ever since.
Nothing about mind makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Hi, Gregory.
http://www.academia.edu/2684367/Evolvable_Hardware
Check out thompson’s tone discriminator.
You jest, keiths.
Hail to Kripke–and long may he reign!
By my lights he could accentuate the atheism-secularism, actually. Seems very intent on downplaying it, it seems to me. A change in the direction I’m thinking of would not only be freeing, but might result in fewer names per paragraph, so it’d be a win-win-win for KN, me AND Gregory!
It is true that scientific essentialists and Kantians disagree on this fundamentally important issue. But it would be a mistake to think that the debate has been decisively settled in favor of scientific essentialism; see “A Kantian Critique of Scientific Essentialism“.
The names/paragraph ratio is an idiosyncrasy of mine, because I aim for transparency and honesty about where I’m being original and where I’m just standing on the shoulders of giants (who themselves were standing on other giants, etc.).
My only originality here lies in seeing how to use Clark’s prediction processing model of cognition to solve an old Kantian problem. But some significant backstory is needed to see what the problem is and why solving it matters.
It’s not that I’m intent on downplaying my secularism; it’s that I’m not interested in stressing it. I’m trying to something slightly new and slightly interesting. I tired of constantly having the same debates all the time. I’m tired of the script. We’ve had all these arguments back and forth and back and forth, and it all feels scripted and rote. I want to say something new.
Thanks for the link.
For now then, I see no good reason to adopt “Kantian radical agnosticism:.” It could well be wrong.
I’m handling that problem by learning ubby-dubby.
I’m thinking of posting about this on my blog.
Roughly, cognitive science appears to be looking for something like a classical physics explanation, with predictive laws. But I think you need something more analogous to evolutionary biology, where the explanation starts with low level processes (metabolism, replication, growth, mutation, etc), and explains how the end result (the biosphere, in the case of biology) emerges from the action of those low level processes.
The Kantian would say that the debate between Kantians and scientific essentialists turns on what kinds of epistemic powers we have and how we know that we have those kinds of epistemic powers.
And a Kantian would also say that “necessary a posteriori” is a deeply problematic category, because it means that our perceptual abilities, as deployed in making actual observations in the actual world (a posteriori), allow us to determine what is true in all possible worlds (necessary). We could do so only if we knew a priori that phenomenal macrostructural properties supervene on noumenal microstrucural properties, but that’s precisely the point of contention!
I agree with that, but I would have thought that embodied-embedded cognitive science does exactly that! You don’t seem to think it does, and I find that puzzling.
I don’t agree with this.
The existence of necessary a posteriori propositions (like that Cicero is Tully) follows from the way reference works. It doesn’t require any of that noumenal microstructural biz.
Oooh. I forgot to say “Hail Kripke; Hail Putnam”!
Sorry. 🙁
Even if Kripke is basically right about reference, Mung mentions scientific essentialism, which is all about “that noumenal microstructure biz”.
According to scientific essentialism, what makes it necessary a posteriori that “Gold has the atomic number 79” is that we discover empirically that anything which has the cluster of phenomenal properties of “gold” (yellow, metallic, malleable, immune to rusting) also has 79 protons. Hence, in any possible world in which there are atoms that have 79 protons, anything composed of those atoms will also be yellow, ductile, immune to rusting, and so forth.
Here’s the problem, though: the phenomenal properties are (I) relational and especially (ii) relational with regard to human sensorimotor capacities. Nothing can be yellow in a world without visible light — and, on my theory of what colors are, nothing is yellow in a world without primate visual systems. (Birds and bees have such different color system than the primate version that I don’t think that what they see counts as colors in our sense.) Similarly, malleability is relative to our physical abilities, and so forth, immune to rust requires oxygen, etc.
And we’re not even discussing possible worlds in which no atom with 79 protons is bonded to any other atom with 79 protons, so that there aren’t any phenomenal properties at all.
You could build all the counterfactuals in — if there were macrophysical objects made of atoms with 79 protons, if there were being with primate-like visual systems, if there was oxygen, etc. — but with each counterfactual you are further restricting the range of possible worlds you’re considering.
By the time you’ve built in all the counterfactuals you need to make this claim true, you’re back at this world and the worlds immediately adjacent to it — and then you’re no longer talking about essences as rigid transworld identities at all.
So there can be possible worlds in which there are atoms with 79 protons, but without gold, and therefore “gold has atomic number 79” is not a necessary truth.
I don’t agree with any of that either. Gold necessarily having the atomic number of 79 doesn’t imply any of that stuff about phenomenal properties. E.g., gold isn’t necessarily golden, given essentialism.
That’s not right. There could be stuff that looked and acted just like gold, but wasn’t gold. That’s what the “twater” examples are about.
It gets information wrong. The tendency seems to be to take a view of information that comes from the manifest image. There’s talk of picking up information, as if information is a natural kind.
From a low level process view, information is created by low level interactions with the environment. Something like the manifest image is then emergent from that created information.
It seems to follow that we do not share information about the world. We each have our own private information. We share (more or less) the emergent manifest image, but not the low level information. And meaning is inherently subjective, because it is tied in with that private low level information.
I’m not sure that Cicero qualifies in the name-dropping competition.
The Twin Earth always rubbed me the wrong way. There was a seminar in Twin Earth my first year of grad school. It was very popular. I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me, gave up in frustration, and ran full speed towards Continental philosophy.
Here’s what’s bothering me: if “gold” means “whatever looks and acts like gold to us here”, then “necessarily, gold has atomic number 79” isn’t a necessary truth. We agree on that much, based on remarks above about contingent and relational properties vs. essential and intrinsic properties.
When you say that “Gold necessarily having the atomic number of 79 doesn’t imply any of that stuff about phenomenal properties. E.g., gold isn’t necessarily golden, given essentialism”, I read that saying that “gold” doesn’t mean “whatever looks and acts like gold to us here and now”.
But if “gold” doesn’t mean that, then what does it mean? If you want to say “‘gold’ means ‘the element with atomic number 79′” then you’ve established only that the term “gold” and the phrase “the element with atomic number 79” play the same roles in the language game.
Presumably the scientific essentialist wants to say that the relation between “gold” and “the element with atomic number 79” is not sameness of meaning (i.e. similarity of functional role, on Sellarsian inferential semantics) but sameness of reference?
But I see no way you can talk about reference without talking about inference (not that I would endorse Brandom’s view that we can explain reference in terms of inference, but the weaker view that we can’t separate them), and no way to talk about inferential patterns without the social norms that institute those patterns, and that leads us right back to the contingent histories of embodiment, language, and culture. And that leads back to a Kantian radical agnosticism about any knowledge of essences by creatures with our kinds of cognitive abilities.
This is what has always frustrated the hell out of me about analytic metaphysics: if you want to do semantics, fine; if you want to do metaphysics, fine (sort of); but don’t put semantics in a cheap tuxedo and call it metaphysics!
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t want to go into this stuff in detail here, but on the Putnam view “gold” doesn’t mean either of the things you mentioned. Confusion over this may have been the cause of your frustration in grad school and your embarking (embarkation?) to the dreaded Continent.
🙂
ETA: added “(embarkation?)” because what I wrote sounded funny. But I have to admit that it doesn’t seem much better now….
walto,
I’m going to have to give “The Meaning of ‘Meaning'” another go.
At bottom I just don’t believe in properties. There are predicates in natural language, and powers in the real order, but there aren’t properties as something distinct from either of those.
Exactly.
“The proposition that water is H2O is one of a very large number of propositions that are true in virtue of the essential properties of natural kinds, and all such propositions are not only true, but necessarily true. If the new essentialists are right, then all of the laws of nature are really like this. They are necessary in what is called the metaphysical, or de re, sense of necessity. They are true not in virtue of what things are called; they are true, rather, in virtue of what they are.”
– Brian Ellis. The Philosophy of Nature.
I don’t think there a real distinction between “essential properties” and “accidental properties”, because I don’t see how the human mind, empirically understood, has the capacity to draw such a distinction.
We have a plethora of natural-language predicates, and most of them are useful for tracking the regularities and irregularities that matter to organisms like us. And over time, some very clever organisms developed some sophisticated ways of tracking regularities and irregularities that aren’t apparent to the unaided sensorimotor system — we invented all sorts of conceptual technologies (like statistical analyses) and material technologies (like distillation and spectography), and in doing so, we figured out which natural-language predicates are most useful for doing that and invented quite a few ones.
But what we can’t do, simply by virtue of consulting our modal intuitions, is tell which predicates lock onto transworld identities and which predicates don’t.
Our modal intuitions can’t do that, because our modal intuitions are themselves just features of our utterly contingent habits of embodied coping and equally contingent norms of discursive practice. Any appeal to intuitions — in this context, our intuitions about modality — is just a fancy way of talking about one’s own evolved neurobiological adaptations and distinctive enculturation.
If our evolutionary history and cultural histories have not provided us with any modal intuitions that mysteriously lock onto underlying order of reality, then there’s no distinction we can draw between essential and accidental properties. Any vindication of essentialism will have to assume the very thing at issue: that we do have robust intuitions about modality that do (somehow, inexplicably, mysteriously) lock onto what must be the case in all possible worlds.
Metaphysical necessity looks attractive only if you think you can get metaphysics “for free”, without inquiring into one’s mode of epistemic access to those metaphysical necessities. Just consulting one’s intuitions about which predicates track essential properties and which predicates merely track accidental properties can’t do the trick, because intuitions are nothing other features of the historical contingencies of biology and culture.
The essentialist assumes that our intuitions are something over and above the accumulated contingencies of biology and culture, but unless essentialism is going to collapse into mere dogmatism, she needs a way of vindicating that assumption. And that’s going to mean showing that the human mind has epistemic powers over and above the receptivity of sensibility and the spontaneity of the understanding. But any argument which establishes that we have such epistemic powers cannot, on pain of circularity, assume that we have such powers. I’m deeply skeptical that there is any such argument.
hotshoe_,
One of my favorite things about my Nook is that I can read werewolf porn on the train without getting weird looks. Care to recommend your favorite authors? I’m a fan of Kelly Armstrong, Laurell Hamilton, Patricia Briggs, and I’m reading the latest Mira Grant. Hmm, what is it with female authors and urban fantasy?
Here’s a slightly more concise way of putting the same point.
The essentialist claims that we can distinguish between essential and non-essential properties. But she can do only by saying that we have robust intuitions that track which predicates refer across worlds and which predicates don’t; that’s what allows her to say that “water is H20” is metaphysically necessary.
The problem is this: how does she know that her own modal intuitions are reliable? In order to know that her intuitions are reliable, she would need a way of vindicating the reliability of her intuitions by explaining her mode of epistemic access to those intuitions, and she would need to do that without assuming that her intuitions are reliable.
Hmmm interesting. I’ll have to think about whether/why essentialism requires that every physical law must be necessary. It’s not immediately obvious to me, because I’d think that some natural laws involve non-essential properties–and it seems like those could be contingent, but maybe I’m missing something.
I don’t know Brian Ellis; do you like him?
There is a , so far crappy, show on NOVA about the brain by David Eagleson. I liked some of his stuff on youtube because he seemed to say there is not just a brain but another thing going on. however he went crazy offside.
The big point is about the soul. We are a thinking soul. Our soul thinks by organizing conclusions(the heart) and using the memory(the mind) to connect our soul to the material world especially our body.
Our mind is giant, giant, memory machine with no mind of its own. However memories seem to have a mind of their own and so confuse everything.
All human thinking problems are from memory problems.
Without stressing the memory its a vanity to talk of human operations in thought.
The bible should of been the guide.
Gregory, I say this with the utmost respect:
Unless you have something useful and enlightening to say, shut up and stop wasting electrons.
Werewolf porn, okay. Man and Beast long-ish story, 20k words, by Jupiter Ash on AO3, epub downloadable for Nook (which is what I use also). I’m not particularly a fan of the rest of their work, but I’ve read the werewolf story more than once.
My current favorite is probably bendingsignpost (on AO3), fantastic, some filthy, including a vampire novel – sorry, no werewolf – and the single best story I’ve ever read The World on His Wrist But it’s so complicated and crazy I had to read it three times to be sure I understood the plot. Sadly the epub download for that one is buggy, there’s a page skip-loop; it really should be read online to avoid fighting page numbers.
If we are talking about the physical laws in our universe, I think that multiverse theories shows that the physical laws of our universe are not necessary. Multiverse theories say the physical laws can vary: at a minimum, the physical constants can vary, and at a maximum (eg Tegmark), the laws can vary to the extent that all that is required is that they be computable.
Now you may say these multiverse theories are not scientific, but, be that as it may, I think they show that our universe’s physical laws are not metaphysically necessary.
That being so, what is the justification for saying that gold essentially has 92 protons? That seems to be dependent on scientific theories, not just for the count of the protons but even for the definition of “proton” itself.
There seems to be an something arbitrary about whether we consider certain constitutional properties to be essential and then whether we use science as the way to describe and ascertain that constitutional property. I think that relates to KN’s concerns about using intuition to define essential properties.
I’m not sure what you mean by “information from the manifest image”. In the case of the predictive brain models that KN’s OP mentions, information is Shannon information.
Specifically, the minimization of prediction error at the core of these theories is mathematically equivalent to a constrained maximization of mutual information between the stimulus and the neural response. Here “mutual information” is defined by the total entropy less the noise entropy.
The constraints on the minimization of perception error include:
– the perceptual and movement capabilities of the organism
– the environmental niche and affordances for the organism (for they affect the relevance of the error to the organism)
– the tradeoff between energy expended to build a neural causal-model type of representation by minimizing error and the level of detail and accuracy which conveys sufficient fitness for the organism to reproduce
All of these constraints are influenced by the evolutionary history of the organism.
I’m unclear on how you can say “we do not share information about the world” when is seems obvious even bees, for example, seem to do a good job of it. Unless you mean “the emergent manifest image” does not contain any information about the world. But surely it does: in the sense of correlation, at least.
Perhaps this has something to do with “low-level” information. What do you mean by applying this adjective to “information”?
Thanks for an interesting post, KN. If you have time to answer a brief question: how does the reference to Sellars approach and predictive coding approach to the issues he raises relate to his Myth of the Given?
I’ve complete an initial, quick read of the Clark book and was a bit disappointed. It read more like a popularization of the neurscience of the Bayesian approach, without much philosophical depth beyond what was already in his previous survey article.
However, he did take the chance to add some new references beyond his 2013 paper, so that will be helpful.
Please don’t stop just when it is getting interesting!
Speaking selfishly, I think it would be great if you could suspend not-arguing in a series of posts with FMM and instead devote some of that effort to really arguing with KN!
I see the Bayesian brain approach as computational. You also mention that it is so in the OP. Of course, it is Bayesian probabilities computation, not the type of computation involving abstract symbols and deduction using if-then logic that characterizes GOFAI computationalism.
This question can then be asked: ‘ is it just the models that are computational or is the brain “really” computing?’. That is a philosophical issue, not a scientific one. What is physical computation? What do successful scientific theories tell us about reality?
There is a separate scientific question about what models best explain and predict the operation of the brain and how the brain came to operate that way.
This is the same distinction that many posters are failing to make in the various threads on genetic coding, although I see some of the recent posts have recognized it by asking what difference it makes whether the code is real to the scientific work to explain cell biochemistry without a designer.
I think that debate is really about a deeper issue: Given that the mind cannot be completely understood without considering the brain/body/world as an entirety, how much can we learn about that whole entity by using scientific systems analysis to understand its parts and how they fit together?*
In the IT field, it is common knowledge that to be successful at IT system design, one must use a process which combines successive iterations of analysis and synthesis to inform each other. I think that applies to science in general, and in, fact, it is my (IT-person’s) understanding of the hermeneutic circle that I’ve come across in philosophy.
I see Clark has been open to that type of reductive analysis of the brain’s role in the whole. You can see that not only in his discussion of representation/intentionality, but also in his tentative attempts to explain qualia. I don’t think the radical enactivists, or the phenomenologists for that matter, are as open to that approach when it comes to these issues.
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* This is the “reduction by mechanism” approach from Bechtel, Craver et al that I think makes a lot of sense.
My own sense is that the essentialist claims rely on a combination of mereological intuitions and a causal theory of reference. For example, if you don’t think that this particular pen could not have been composed of different parts (that if it were it would really be a different pen), then you will not likely believe that whatever is gold necessarily has a particular constitution.
Also, it’s important to remember that gold can essentially have 92 protons only if gold actually DOES have 92 protons. I.e., the claim is that if it’s true, it’s necessarily true. It could (epistemically) turn out not to be true.
Do you know this Ellis person that Mung cited?
PS: I don’t want to argue with KN about this. Sorry.
Whereas I didn’t read the survey article (the one from BBS, right?), so the Baysesian neuroscience is entirely new to me!
I’m conflicted about this. My initial response to say,
“brains aren’t really computing, because organisms are autopoietic systems with goals and purposes (or, if you prefer the Kantian version: purposiveness without purpose), and as such they are also dynamical systems subject to real forces described by physics and chemistry; there are relevant facts about how quickly a signal can be transmitted across a synapse or along an axon that are determined by the physico-chemical properties of neurotransmitters and myelin. A computational approach might be a good simulation of neurodynamics, but it’s not more than that”
But then, having said that, I second-guess myself. Isn’t there some way in which computational neuroscience is less simulation-like of real brains than, say, how a flight simulator is a simulation of a real plane? So maybe it’s less of a simulation and more of a very crude but useful map?
I don’t know. I’ll be worrying about this for most of the day now.
(And I think there’s a similar point about whether the genetic code is “really” a code.)
Yes, I think that the enactivists are so insistent on holism that they are leery of doing any component analysis. At least it’s a worry worth having about that approach.
There was a question, too about the predictive processing model and the Myth of the Given. At first pass, I don’t think that they relate directly.
The Myth of the Given is (on my version) a kind of cognitive semantic foundationalism that arises at the personal level, within the space of reasons, in the accounts we give as to how we know that our thoughts have objective purport rather than, as McDowell puts it, a “frictionless spinning in the void”. The critique of the Myth of the Given presupposes inferential semantics, although it is often construed as a premise in an argument for why we need inferential semantics. The line of thought is, “if semantics is inferential, then nothing is Given, so we need a different way of accounting for the “friction” that confers objective purport on our thoughts”.
PP, by contrast, is a theory about the dynamical causal structures of proper brain functioning. As such it is a subpersonal account; in the Dennettian sense that personal-level concepts like perceiving, acting, deciding, and so on are used analogously in understanding how different cortical and subcortical structures process information. It has to be analogous in order to avoid the homunculus fallacy.
The problem I face — which is not, perhaps, Dennett’s problem, although it is a problem for Wheeler and Clark — is this: a living minded animal is a semantic engine (it has thoughts with content). Brains are syntactic engines (which is why they can be modeled as if they are computers). Somehow, this gap between syntax and semantics must be crossed — or at the very least, narrowed.
(Notice that Dennett doesn’t face this problem because he denies that there is original intentionality; on his view, there aren’t any real semantic engines, just syntactic engines that are very good semantic engine simulators. Also notice that Searle’s critique of AI rests on the assumption that semantics is irreducible to syntax. But as the Churchlands point out, that assumption can’t be taken on mere faith — after all, we might discover that, with a really good theory of what brains do, semantics is reducible to syntax after all.)