To Be or Not To Be: The Self as Illusion

Tuesday, December 7, 2010 | 6:00 PM - 7:15 PM
The New York Academy of Sciences
Presented by the Nour Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences

Panelists  

Pim van Lommel, MD, Hospital Rijnstate, The Netherlands 

Thomas Metzinger, PhD, University of Mainz, Germany

Evan Thompson, PhD, University of Toronto

Evidence from studies of the brain and mind point to a construct of the Self resulting from complex neurobiological processes interacting with the environment. If distinct neurobiological correlates of consciousness do in fact exist, does that necessarily imply that the Self is an epiphenomenon and illusion? Furthermore, how do these characterizations of the Self affect the way we represent ourselves, our responsibilities, and our actions in the world?
Renowned philosophers Thomas Metzinger and Evan Thompson will join cardiologist and expert on near-death experiences, Pim van Lommel, to examine recent developments in neuroscience and philosophy that shed light on whether our conscious experience of a unified Self is reality or illusion.

Moderator

Krista Tippett, MDiv, Creator and Host of Public Radio's Being

Reception to Follow
This event is part of a 6-part series, Perspectives on the Self: Conversations on Identity and Consciousness, bringing together experts from science and the humanities for an interdisciplinary discussion of the evolving notion and experience of the Self.

Further details here.

Dretske and Thompson Redux 2

This goes back to a discussion a while back that I wanted to bleg.

Dretske and Thompson apparently differ in their theories of original meaning.  Has either published an objection to the other?  Has Thompson published an objection to Dretske's theory?  If so, what is the objection?  (I'm betting that Dretske has not published an objection to Thompson's theory, but I haven't read any of his later stuff.)

It seems to me that there is a good chance that D&T (or their supporters) have not really engaged each other, but any references or argument sketches would be great.

Bold enough to be exciting; tame enough to be plausible 1

That's what advocates of EC want.  So, it seems to me to lead to some fancy philosophical footwork.

So, for example, in the preface to Mind in Life, Thompson writes, "Where there is life there is mind" (p. ix).  Bold indeed.  Plants and slime molds have minds.  But, then he immediately walks this back.  "Life and mind share a core set of formal or organizational properties, and the formal or organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life".  Tame.

In truth, it appears that the second clause of this second sentence contradicts the claim that where there is life there is mind.  More specifically, we can have life without mind in those cases where one does not have the enriched version of the properties fundamental to life.

I'm sure there are ways out of this.  So, the first might be taken to be a true empirical generalization, where the latter a claim about (logical, nomological, metaphysical, conceptual) possibilities that are not, in empirical fact, actualized.  Fancy philosophical footwork.  It's really hard to pin philosophers down enough to convict them of inconsistency.

Chemero vs Thompson & Stapleton

Thompson and Stapleton write,

Without autonomy (operational closure) there is no original meaning; there is only the derivative meaning attributed to certain processes by an outside observer.  (Thompson and Stapleton, 2010, p. 28).

So, T&S believe in non-derived content and Chemero has written that he is pursuing an enactivist theory of cognition of the sort developed by Thompson, Varela, and others.  Yet, one of Chemero's core ideas is anti-representationalism.  I'm not sure how that all works out, but it looks to me as though one should read Chemero as developing his own views, rather than pushing those of others.  (In fact, I have this vague sense from having read an earlier draft of his book manuscript that Chemero's "Gibsonianism" doesn't look 100% like Gibson's views.  But, that was a long time ago and I'm getting a little long in the tooth.)

Information Processing Models Don't Explain Autonomy?

Thompson and Stapleton write,

The enactive approach regards these information-processing models as limited.  From the enactive perspective, their problem is fundamental: they do not explain autonomy hence cannot explain cognition. 

     Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems.  ... These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes.  As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world. (Thompson and Stapleton, 2010, p. 28).

This is one I just don't get.  I don't see the argument here.  So, let us grant T&S the idea that cognitive processes are personal level processes and that autonomy is an organismal level property.  Now, of course, one does not have to explain the whole of the organism by appeal only to one of its components, namely, the brain.  But, I-P approaches can appeal to other components of a person beside the brain, e.g. the parts of the body. Indeed, there are many areas where the properties and processes of a system are explained in terms of the properties and processes of its components.  Haugeland (who appears to be sympathetic to enactivist ideas) describes this kind of approach in his "Mind Embodied and Embedded", but it is also familiar from Rob Cummins' account of functional analysis and Machamer, Darden, and Craver's theory of mechanistic explanation.  And, there is also Craver's Explaining the Brain.  It seems as though T&S suppose that the only way I-P theories can explain autonomy is by limiting their attention to the brain.  But, that is not right.  In fact, it is hard to believe that this is what they can be assuming.  So, what is going on here?

Who Supports Revolutionary EC? 7

Thompson and Stapleton:

What goes on strictly inside the head never as such counts as a cognitive process.  It counts only as a participant in a cognitive process that exists as a relation between the system and its environment.  (Thompson and Stapleton, 2010, p. 26).

Given that Thompson and Stapleton are, or at least appear to be, revolutionaries regarding any kind of intracranial cognition.  We should expect an argument that there is none such.  Tune in tomorrow...

How do these fit?

Thompson and Stapleton write,

Of course, what goes on inside the system is crucial for enabling the system's cognitive or sense-making relation to its environment, but to call internal process as such cognitive is to confuse levels of discourse or to make a category mistake (neurons do not think and feel; people and animals do).  (Thompson and Stapleton, 2010, p. 26).

Personally, I don't put that much stake in worries about category mistakes for the reasons I think are well-fleshed out by Searle and Dennett in Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. (And, the rhetoric is somewhat misleading, since one might say that, while neurons probably do not think and feel, perhaps the whole brain does.) But, how is this category mistake idea to be reconciled with this:

Attention to the inseparability of emotion and cognition is an emerging trend in cognitive science.  For example, Marc Lewis (2005) argues that appraisal and emotion processes are thoroughly interdependent at both psychological and neural levels.  ... (ibid, p. 26).

and this:

In a recent review, Pessoa (2008) provides extensive evidence from neuroscience that supports this view of the neural underpinnings of emotion and cognition (p. 27).

It's pretty hard to catch a philosopher in an outright contradiction, but the tension is obvious.  How can one assert that there is evidence that neural cognitive processes and neural emotive processes are integrated, when it is a category mistake (i.e. nonsense) to talk about neural cognitive processes?

Is sense-making cognition?

Thompson and Stapleton write,

Whether we choose to call the sense-making of bacteria cognitive or proto-cognitive is not something we need to dispute here.  ... The important point is that a living organism is a system capable of relating cognitively to the world ... because it is a sense-making system (Thompson and Stapleton, 2010, p. 24).

This seems to me to just talk around the issue.  Now, one should have some sympathy for not wanting to get into a terminological dispute.  Fine.  But, then why insist on saying that cognition is sense-making?  Thompson and Stapleton don't do that exactly, but it is not clear why anyone who resists the idea that sense-making is cognition would be willing to accept the claim that a living organism is a system capable of relatively cognitively to the world because it is a sense-making system.  This move seems to me merely to change the way in which the issue is framed, but not its substance.

Forthcoming posts

I'm thinking that for a blog to be successful, it has to be more interactive than this one has been.  So, I am hoping that my forthcoming posts on Thompson and Stapleton's paper, "Making sense of Sense-Making" will encourage my Toronto readers to chime in.  There are things in this paper I just don't get.

Who Supports Revolutionary EC? 5

Evan Thompson:

Our mental lives involve our body and the world beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the head. (Thompson, 2007, p. ix)