Noë at the Hughes Leblanc

http://philomtl.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/conferences-hugues-leblanc/.

Thanks to John Protevi for the link.

Spina's Review of Noë 's Out of Our Heads

Here.

Gibson, 1979, Chapter 8

Andrew just suggested that the exploding box example is not a problem for EP.  But, it's the kind of case that appears to be relevant in evaluating empirical claims suggested in the following:

I have described the environment as the surfaces that separate substances from the medium in which the animals live. But I have also described what the environment affords animals, mentioning the terrain, shelters, water, fire, objects, tools, other animals, and human displays. How do we go from surfaces to affordances? And if there information in light for the perception of surfaces, is there information for the perception of what they afford?  (Gibson, 1979, p. 127).

So, consider the last question: "If there information in light for the perception of surfaces, is there information for the perception of what they afford?"

Now, there is, to my mind, an ambiguity in this.  Notice that, strictly speaking, Gibson is writing about surfaces, not objects.  To see this, replace the pronoun with its antecedent:

(A) If there information in light for the perception of surfaces, is there information for the perception of what surfaces afford?

Contrast that with the question: 

(B) If there information in light for the perception of surfaces of an object, is there information for the perception of what the object affords?

Now, (A) is a little odd, since it is perhaps not the surface of the fish, say, that affords edibility, but the "meat" of the fish that affords edibility.  Or, to use a TSRM example, it is not the surface of a thing that affords potability.


Now, contrast these questions with some more restrictive questions:

(A') If there information in light for the perception of surfaces, is there information for the perception of what surfaces afford prehension?

Contrast that with the question: 

(B') If there information in light for the perception of surfaces of an object, is there information for the perception of what the object affords prehension?

Maybe this too reads a bit awkwardly, but one gets the idea (I hope) that it is not the information for all affordances that is provided by information in light for the perception of surfaces; instead, it is only the information for prehension affordances that is provided by information in the light for perception of surfaces.

Finally, there are questions about even weaker matters, like the one's Noë hints at,

(A'') If there information in light for the perception of surfaces, is there information for the perception of some of the properties that surfaces afford?

Contrast that with the question: 

(B'') If there information in light for the perception of surfaces of an object, is there information for the perception of some of the properties that the object affords prehension?

Noë on Exploring the Environment

Actionism is committed to the idea that perception is active, but not in the sense that it requires that one move. What is required is that one understand the relevance of movement to action, and that one knows what would happen if one were to move. Perception is active, according to the actionist, in the same way that thought is active. We exercise our sensorimotor understanding when we see.
(Noë, 2010, p. 247).

According to the sensorimotor or, as I shall call it, actionist approach, perceiving is an activity of exploring the environment making use of this kind of knowledge of the sensory effects of movement. 
(Noë, 2010, p. 245)

So, Noë doesn't think that perception requires movement, but he does think that perceiving is an activity of exploring the environment.  But, then, how does one explore an environment without moving?

Noë on Gibson on Affordances

Here is a kind of interesting passage from Noe's paper:

On a familiar reading of Gibson (1979), he is said to have held something like this. For example, Campbell (2002) characterizes Gibson as follows:

... suppose, for example, that an unfamiliar piece of apparatus appears on a workbench. I have no idea what this thing is for. I don't know if I can touch it - maybe I will be electrocuted, or the thing will blind me, if I do that. Or maybe it is simply the latest kind of television, or a paper weight. So I don't see it as affording anything in particular. In that case, by Gibson's theory, the thing should be simply invisible; I should be able to see it only when I am told what it is for. But that is not a persuasive conclusion; it seems perfectly obvious that we can see things without knowing what they can be used for.
(Campbell, 2002, p.143)

As I read Gibson he is not committed to such a conclusion, for it is not Gibson's view that we only see affordances, or that we can only see objects in so far as we can see their affordances. Gibson's point comes earlier: that we can see affordances. The significance of his thought is this: for Gibson, perceptual consciousness is not confined to so-called categorical properties of things, such as shape say, or size, or qualities like colour. Gibson is advancing 'the radical hypothesis' that 'the "values", and "meanings" of things in the environment can be perceived directly' (Gibson, 1979, p.127).  (Noë, 2010, p. 247).

Now, I had always thought that Gibson's view is that one always perceives affordances.  I'm not entirely sure why, but I thought that perception was always supposed to work something like this: Affordances structure light (for example) and humans pick up the information in the light.  Simple.

I wonder how many people read Gibson as Noë does.  Comments welcome.  Comments with references to Gibsonian pronouncements even more welcome.

But, suppose that Noë is right.  Is there some place where Gibson spells out when one perceives (or can perceive) affordances and when not.  In other words, when do we get affordance perception and when do we not?

Noë's Activism versus The Movement View

I've just started Noë's recent "Vision without Representation".  In it, he draws a distinction between Activism and The Movement View:

1. Actionism

This is the view that seeing requires the possession and exercise of knowledge of the sensory effects of movement (sensorimotor understanding, in other words).

2. The Movement View

On this view, actual physical movement is necessary for seeing. (Noë, 2010, p. 250).

This is, in essential respects, the distinction I marked in "Consciousness: Don't Give up on the Brain", in terms of Strong and Weak Enactivism:

what we might call Noë’s “strong enactivism”.  This is the view that bodily movement is necessary for perception or perceptual consciousness.  Contra Noë’s strong enactivism, there is solid empirical evidence against the view that consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, body, and world or that seeing is an activity of exploring the world.  This evidence consists of certain experiments and clinical observations involving neuromuscular blockade that reveal perception without bodily movement.  Section 3 will challenge what we might call Noë’s “weak enactivism”.  Noë claims that “For mere stimulation to constitute perceptual experience—that is, for it to have genuine world-presenting content—the perceiver must possess and make use of sensorimotor knowledge.”   Perhaps we can drop the idea that a perceiver must make use of sensorimotor knowledge in the form of bodily movement in order to perceive.  Perhaps instead, in the absence of the joint operation of the brain, body, and world, tacit knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies has the role in perception that Noë attributes to it.  (Aizawa, 2010, p. 264)

Noë: Thinking versus Behaving

to insist that thinking and feeling happen in the brain is rather like insisting that speech — talking — happens in the brain. We could not speak without the brain, to be sure. But speech also depends on many other physical processes — such as articulatory movements in the mouth and throat, and also respiratory activity. And of course it depends on social circumstances, and needs. People speak, and they do so thanks to their brains, and mouths, and throats, and much else besides (e.g. the existence of socially shared linguistic practices!)

So, here is really the nub of something important. Speaking is a behavior, hence clearly constitutively involves more than just the brain.  Now, the proposal can be that thinking and feeling are also behaviors, in which case they too would constitutively involve more than just the brain. But, the analogy breaks down if thinking and feeling are not behaviors, but mental processes.  Didn't analytic philosophy work through this about fifty years ago?

Noë: From the epistemological to the metaphysical

The epistemological:

We are a very long way off from knowing how to answer these questions.

2. We see that the practical questions trail off into questions of principle. But the matters of principle ramify. Consider this: When we speak of establishing baselines and “training up the detector,” what we are acknowledging is that neural states and processes only have meaning or significance in context. This is very important. It shows not that absent information about context, we can’t make sense of what the brain is telling us. It shows that in the absence of context, the brain isn’t telling us anything at all.

The metaphysical:

Mental phenomena are not neural phenomena.

You get the drift ...  Read the whole of Noë's NPR post here.

Noë: "The brain is necessary for our life, but it is hardly sufficient"

This is a little wooly, since there is a perfectly legitimate sense in which the brain is not sufficient for life.  We have to have some functioning method for breathing and obtaining nourishment, for example.

And, there is some need for clarification of what kind of necessity and sufficiency one is talking about. 

But, the neuromuscular blockade stuff shows pretty strongly as far as I can tell that the brain is a minimal supervenience base for consciousness, as opposed to life.  The only reply I've heard to this observation is that the neuromuscular blockade results do not show that the brain alone is that all conscious states.

Noë on Why we think we are our brain 2

Despite having learned so much about the anatomy and physiology of the human brain in the last century, we don’t actually have a better account of how consciousness and cognition arise in the brain than it arises out of immaterial soul-stuff.

This last claim is not controversial, not really. But then why are we so certain, as a scientific and as a popular culture, that the secrets to our nature lie inside us, in the brain?

Answer: We can’t imagine an alternative to this “you are your brain” idea that does not end up giving up on science. Either you are your brain, or you are a mystery.

Why are we so certain that the secret to our nature lies in the brain?  Roughly, the leg doesn't matter because you are still present when you break your leg or your leg is amputated.  Same for arm, left lung, right lung, heart, etc.  Much of this would be evident from observing the effects of injuries.  In the 20th Century, this common sense has been supported by experiments with neuromuscular blockade in which mental life is surprisingly stable, despite essentially complete bodily incapacitation.  That seems to me to be a start on at least a solid (albeit defeasible) basis for thinking that you are your brain, even not the basis of some certainty. 

Noë on Why we think we are our brain 1

From Noë's NPR blog post a few weeks back ...

Despite having learned so much about the anatomy and physiology of the human brain in the last century, we don’t actually have a better account of how consciousness and cognition arise in the brain than it arises out of immaterial soul-stuff.

This last claim is not controversial, not really. But then why are we so certain, as a scientific and as a popular culture, that the secrets to our nature lie inside us, in the brain?

Answer: We can’t imagine an alternative to this “you are your brain” idea that does not end up giving up on science. Either you are your brain, or you are a mystery.

It seems to me to be pretty common in the history of science to know that some object produces some phenomenon without knowing how that object produces that phenomenon.  So, for example, humans knew for millennia that the sun produces light, but only for the last hundred years or so have humans known that the sun produces light by nuclear fusion.  The organs of the body provide especially clear cases.  Humans have known for millennia that the alimentary canal digests food, but only for the last hundred years or so have humans known how the alimentary canal digests food.  Humans have known for millennia that the muscles produce contractile forces that move the body, but only for the last fifty years or so have humans known how the muscles produce contractile forces that move the body.  So, it's roughly par for the course to be in a situation where we understand that the brain is the seat of the self, but not know how the brain produces the self.

Noë: Beyond Brain Reading

Over at the NPR blog.

Noë at NPR: Does Thinking Happen in the Brain?

Yes, .... or Noë.

.

Gregory Recalls S.B.

An interesting note from Nature from a while ago. Many readers of this blog will know of S.B. (Sidney Bradford) by way of Alva Noë's Action in Perception.  Bradford was one of the  congenitally blind individuals who had corneal grafts in adulthood.  Noe interpreted this case as an illustration of "experiential blindness".

Gregory believes S.B.'s case provides a positive answer to the Molyneaux question.

Gregory on Downplaying the Mystery of Inverted Vision

We now think of the brain as representing, rather as the symbols of language represent characteristics of things, although the shapes and sounds of language are quite different from whatever is being represented. Language requires rules of grammar (syntax), and meanings of symbols (semantics). Both seem necessary for processes of vision; though its syntax and semantics are implicit, to be discovered by experiment.
     Some puzzles of vision disappear with a little thought. It is no special problem that the eyes' images are upside down and optically right-left reversed-for they are not seen, as pictures, by an inner eye. (Gregory, 1997, p. 5).

Noë, and others, often suggest that upside down images are pseudo-problems that representationalism invokes.  But, Gregory pretty quickly dispenses with this putative problems.  He clearly presents them as only prima facie puzzling features of vision--features that might confuse common sense or early scientific theorizing, but ones that do not give rise to deep perplexity for representationalists.

Pylyshyn also Rejects the Homunculus View

 

One reason why understanding vision is so difficult is that we who are attempting to understand the process are so deeply embedded in the phenomenology of perception: We know what it feels like to see. We look out and see the world, and we cannot escape the impression that what we have in our heads is a detailed, stable, extended, and veridical display that corresponds to the scene before us. Of course, most of us have also seen enough examples of so-called "optical illusions," so we are prepared to admit that what we see is not always what is truly the case. Yet at the same time we have much more difficulty shedding the view that in our heads is a display that our inner first-person self, or our cognitive homunculus, observes. There are other phenomena relating to our experience of seeing a "picture in our head" that are even more problematic. These include the similar experience that we have without any visual input: the experience that accompanies mental imagery or visual thinking. The more we analyze what must be going on and the more we examine the empirical evidence, the more puzzling the process becomes and the less tenable our intuitions. Indeed, we find not only that we must dispense with the "picture in the head," but that we must also revise our ideas concerning the nature of the mechanisms involved in vision and concerning the nature of the internal informational states corresponding to percepts or images. What can never serve as a theory of vision is a theory that says that vision creates a copy of the world inside the head, as the Kliban cartoon in figure 1.1 suggests is the case with a cat. The understanding that this sort of theory will not do is what makes this cartoon funny. Yet it is nontrivial to say what exactly is wrong with a theory that even remotely resembles this sort of story  (Pylyshyn, 2003, pp. 2-3).

Now, Pylyshyn (like everyone right?) rejects the "homunculus" theory of perception, just as does Gibson.  But, Pylyshyn and Gibson reject it for very different reasons (which I won't go in to.)  The point is that (Gibson's contentions notwithstanding) one can start with an image projected on the retina, but still not end up by postulating a homunculus.

Note as well how Pylyshyn, like Noë, rejects part of what is meant by an imagistic theory of perception, albeit again for very different reasons.

Runeson on Sensory Deprivation Experiments

Inhibited practice
If a person is not allowed to use his planimeter for a number of years, he may be unable to use it afterwards. Either the planimeter has deteriorated through corrosion or the user has grown too old to relearn its use.
     Moral. The problems encountered by blind people who get their vision back through operation could be of the above kind. The same might be true for the practical blindness exhibited by kittens who have been moved around passively for a long time. (Runeson, 1977, p. 177).

The moral Runeson draws actually reminds me of an issue that I've not yet broached.  So, what, according to Ecological Psychologists (EPs), is the explanation of the visual deficits of those who have congenital cateracts removed?  What do they say about the deficits of the kittens in the Hein and Held experiment?  Are they going to say anything more than something in the body has deteriorated through corrosion?  (I know Noë's line on this and I don't think it works, but is there a "standard" EP line?)

Most importantly, what do they say about the deficits in experiments with monocular lid suture?  These look to be cases in which the neurons of the visual system develop abnormally.  But, EPs seem not to want to talk about the brain.  I have not seen an outright prohibition or denunciation of research on the brain, but then again EPs don't seem to talk much about it anyway.  Gibson, 1979, has no index entry for "brain".

Chemero apparently thinks Gibson rejects use of information about the brain, but Gary has rejected that rejection.

Hurley's Observations on Braille Readers

To take one fascinating idea, consider Susan Hurley on “variable neural correlates.”  We are comfortable with the correlation between types of experience and types of brain states, and undoubtedly such variation is one important source for the idea that the mind is in the head. Hurley notes, however, that there is also a dependence of experience on type of interaction with the environment, one not aligned to strictly neural properties. For example, when blind people haptically read Braille text, activity in the visual cortex seems to correlate with tactile experience. In people who are not blind, tactile experience correlates with activity in the tactile cortex. What explains the common enabling of tactile experience by the different kinds of cortex seems to be tactile causal coupling with the environment, rather than strictly neural type. (Myin, 2010, p. 590).

I haven't read all of Hurley's long and difficult paper, "Varieties of Externalism," but by Myin's account, it looks to be an instance of the kind of argument Noë gives in his Out of Our Heads book.  I give the cartoon reply here.  I discuss this argument in more detail in my "Consciousness: Don't Give up on the Brain."

So, it looks like I should look over the science concerning the brains of those who read Braille.

Carman on Merleau-Ponty on Perception

Hurley, Ross & Ladyman, and others, have objected to Adams and myself drawing attention to a distinction between causation and constitution that we take to be implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the EC literature.  Moreover, I have sometimes been taken to task for misreading Noë on the role of action in perception.

Reading through a new text on Merleau-Ponty, by Taylor Carman, however, makes me feel a bit better that we have not simply imagined this distinction and Noë's view on the matter.

Merleau-Ponty maintains that perception is not an event or state in the mind or brain, but an organism’s entire bodily relation to its environment.  Perception is, as psychologist J. J. Gibson puts it in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, an “ecological” phenomenon.  The body consequently cannot be understood as a mere causal link in a chain of events that terminates in perceptual experience.  Instead, it is constitutive of perception, which is the most basic—and in the end, inescapable—horizon of what Merleau-Ponty, following Heidegger, calls our “being in the world” (être au monde).  Human existence thus differs profoundly from the existence of objects, for it consists not in our merely occurring among things, but in our actively and intelligently inhabiting an environment.  (Carman, 2008, p. 1)

Obvious caveats apply.  Perhaps Carman has gotten M-P wrong.  Perhaps Noë doesn't buy this part of M-P's view.  My point is that plausibly conscientious readers can come to the view that a causation-constitution distinction is in play in at least some segments of the literature.  (I think that Mike Wheeler, for one, has moved away from this way of thinking about EC.)  Moreover, plausibly conscientious readers can come to the conclusion that Noë, under M-P's influence, thinks (at least at times) that perception requires bodily action.

My paper "Consciousness: Don't Give up on the Brain" is Now Officially in Print

Thanks, Basile, Julian, and Pauline for all the editorial work!

Consciousness: Don't Give up on the Brain (2010). In Pierfrancesco, B., Kiverstein, J., & Phemister, (Eds.) The Metaphysics of Consciousness: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 67. (pp. 263-284).

Abstract

In the extended mind literature, one sometimes finds the claim that there is no neural correlate of consciousness.  Instead, there is a biological or ecological correlate of consciousness.  Consciousness, it is claimed, supervenes on an entire organism in action.  Alva Noë is one of the leading proponents of such a view.  This paper resists Noë’s view.  First, it challenges the evidence he offers from neuroplasticity.  Second, it presses a problem with paralysis.  Third, it draws attention to a challenge from the existence of metamers and visual illusions.

This volume is a collection of papers from a conference organized at the University of Edinburgh to honor the work and philosophical legacy of Timothy L. S. Sprigge (1932-2007).  (Obit here.) 

Thanks, also, to my friend Leemon McHenry, for the invitation to participate in this event.  Leemon (R), Fred Adams (L), and I (C) were colleagues together years ago at Central Michigan University.  It was great to catch up, especially in Edinburgh!