Happy New Year 2011

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.

How do you get to HEC from here?

I have repeatedly stated my position that cognitive integration starts from the following positions:

• That we are actively embodied in a socially constructed cognitive niche and
• That phylogenetically and ontogenetically there is good evidence to suppose that we acquire cognitive capacities to create, maintain and manipulate the shared cognitive niche and
• That this has led to the development of hybrid cognitive systems where the bodily manipulation of vehicles (some of them representational) in the niche involves the coordination of neural, bodily and environmental vehicles.
• Cognitive processing sometimes involves these online bodily manipulations of the cognitive niche, but also collaborative thinking and offline private thinking.

Consequently, I propose that I am not committed to the view that cognition is first in the head and then gets extended into tools. Nor does it follow that I am committed to the idea that pencils can think for themselves. (Menary, 2010)

So, as I read these claims, I don't see HEC on the list.  I don't see anything like the claim that cognitive processes are realized by (or supervene on) brain, body, and world.  But, maybe that's just my shortsightedness.  Doesn't Menary believe that cognitive processes are realized by or supervene on brain, body, and world?

Or, maybe there's an argument that links these theses to HEC.  If so, what is it?

Wherein Menary is Right

I have repeatedly stated my position that cognitive integration starts from the following positions:

• That we are actively embodied in a socially constructed cognitive niche and
• That phylogenetically and ontogenetically there is good evidence to suppose that we acquire cognitive capacities to create, maintain and manipulate the shared cognitive niche and
• That this has led to the development of hybrid cognitive systems where the bodily manipulation of vehicles (some of them representational) in the niche involves the coordination of neural, bodily and environmental vehicles.
• Cognitive processing sometimes involves these online bodily manipulations of the cognitive niche, but also collaborative thinking and offline private thinking.

Consequently, I propose that I am not committed to the view that cognition is first in the head and then gets extended into tools. Nor does it follow that I am committed to the idea that pencils can think for themselves. (Menary, 2010)

A&A agree with all of these claims.  We think Menary is right on this stuff.  (Incidentally, this is why we largely ignore Menary's four claims about integration: "Adams and Aizawa, strangely, fail to notice the discussion of four different theses that are supposed to motivate integration: the manipulation thesis, the hybrid mind thesis, the transformation thesis and the cognitive norms thesis." (Menary, 2010).)

But, notice that this list of positions does not contain HEC: "According to this view ... human cognitive processing literally extends into the environment and surrounding organism, and human cognitive states literally comprise--as wholes do their proper parts--elements in that environment" (Rupert, 2004, p. 393).  Menary does not include the claim that "the material vehicles of cognition can be spread out across brain, body and certain aspects of the physical environment itself’"

So, maybe he is not defending EC after all, or at least the version of EC that Clark defends.  (Of course, Menary does claim that "cognitive integration starts from the following positions", so maybe he still does want to defend HEC.  Not absolutely clearly.)

But, why would A&A have thought that Menary defends the kind of EC that Clark does?  His 2006 paper begins with this:

Recently internalists (Adams & Aizawa, 2001, 2006; Rupert, 2004) have mounted a counter-attack on the attempt to redefine the bounds of cognition. Their counterarguments are aimed at the extended mind hypothesis, which, as Andy Clark has recently put it, is the view that ‘‘the material vehicles of cognition can be spread out across brain, body and certain aspects of the physical environment itself’’ (Clark, 2005, p. 1).
     However, I think that the extended mind hypothesis is part of a more radical
project which I call ‘‘cognitive integration,’’ which is the view that internal and
external vehicles and processes are integrated into a whole. It is this more radical
project that Clark and others are really engaged in.  (Menary, 2006, p. 329).

So, insofar as Menary's complaint is that we have not challenged the items in his bulleted lists, he's right.  We have mostly set aside discussion of those things, since we think they are correct.  What we have strived to challenge is HEC (and mostly the arguments typicaly given for HEC), or the idea that cognitive processes are typically realized by processes in brain, body, and world.

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. 

Gregory on the Grand Illusion

It is sometimes said that all perception is a grand illusion. But this does not help. We may be driven into saying that 'everything is illusion', but this is as pointless as saying 'everything is a dream'. For when applied to everything, the words 'dream' and 'illusion' cease to have meaning. We need contrasts for seeing, and contrasts for describing and thinking. To claim that there is an illusion, there must be some contrasting non-illusion. This applies across the board. If every object were red there would be no point in seeing red, or using the word 'red'.

What are illusions?  

We may say that illusions are departures from reality-but what reality? Appearances are very different from deep realities of physics. If these are taken as reference truths we would have to  say that all perceptions are illusions. This is as pointless as saying that perception is a dream.  Illusions are judged with simple common-sense ideas of physics, and measured with kitchen instruments: rulers, clocks, scales, thermometers, and so on. We might define illusions as deviations from kitchen physics. (Gregory, 2009, pp. 9-10).

I think this is a disappointing reply to the idea of the grand illusion: "To claim that there is an illusion, there must be some contrasting non-illusion."  All of vision could be a grand illusion if all visual perception were a deviation from kitchen physics.  (Set aside the worries one might have about this definition.)  The contrast would be if a visual perception were not a deviation from kitchen physics.  I would think that the illusion/non-illusion distinct only requires a conceptual or theoretical distinction or a logical possibility of something that is an illusion and something that is a non-illusion.  We seem to have this.  We do not, however, require positive instances of both illusions and non-illusions.

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.

Sterelny as Fan of EC?

I have not read Sterelny's paper in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, but I am skeptical that he is the fan of EC that Menary suggests he is.  Here is Sterelny from a paper back in 2004.

"to depict much of advanced cognition as rooted in the operation of the same basic kinds of capacity used for on-line, adaptive response, but tuned and applied to the special domain of external and/or artificial cognitive aids-the domain, as I shall say, of wideware or cognitive technology."((Clark forthcoming) chapter 8)

To a significant extent we are serial processing inference engines. But we are so only because of our reliable, designed, adjusted coupling with a staggering array of cognitive artefacts, including linguistic and quantitative systems of serial representation. Our extended mind uses and processes linguiform representations even though (quite likely) naked human brains do not.
     Furthermore, some of these artefacts can literally be parts of an agent's cognitive system. In The Extended Mind, Andy Clark and David Chalmers develop a thought-experiment about an Alzheimers sufferer (Mr T, as I shall call him). Mr T cannot unaided remember the location of an exhibit he wants to visit. But he manages such problems by writing down in a notebook crucial information for his daily plans notebook. He then acts by consulting this book. Clark and Chalmers argue that the information in the notebook plays the same functional role for Mr T that an ordinary (non-occurrent) belief plays for ordinary human agents. They conclude we should count the notebook as part of the patient's mind, and the location of the exhibit as one of Mr T's beliefs (Clark and Chambers 1998). Clark is careful not to trivialise this extension of the boundaries of the mind. He insists that agents' minds include only those exter¬nal tools to which they have regular, unfettered access: "the props and aids which can count as part of my mental machinery ... are at the very least, reliably available when needed and used or accessed pretty much as automatically as biological processing and memory" (2001, p139).
     While agreeing with Clark on the fundamental role of epistemic agency in explaining human rationality, I have reservations about this picture. Even when there is a reliable link between user and tool, there are important differences between internal and external cognitive resources. The external storage of information is very important, but the psychological and evolutionary dynamics of mind /filofax relations are critically different from those of mind/memory interactions. So I do not think it is helpful to think of epistemic artefacts as literally parts of the minds of the agents that regularly use them. Moreover and more importantly, Clark underplays the importance of non-exclusive use of epistemic artefacts. Many of our most important cognitive tools are common-use tools, not parts of coupled systems. (Sterelny, 2004, p. 245).

Far from supporting EC, it seems to me that Sterelny comes very close to the Adams and Aizawa view.  Instead, he seems to be supporting something like HEMC.  

The way the Sutton and Menary papers are shaping up, it sounds to me as though they are unhappy that I am challenging, say, Clark's version of EC, but not their version of EC. 

Menary and Sterelny are for HEMC?

Indeed, Sterelny argues that our cognitive capacities are deeply dependent upon the cognitive niche such that the cognitive capacities of the agent are transformed by interactions with the niche. It would be closer to the mark to talk of the niche ‘extending’ into the agent, in the sense that the agent acquires new  representations and new capacities by being ‘coupled’ to or scaffolded by the niche. For Sterelny, there is no cognitive agent without embedding in the cognitive niche.

This is consistent with HEMC:

Cognitive processes depend very heavily, in hitherto unexpected ways, on organismally external props and devices and on the structure of the external environment in which cognition takes place (Rupert, 2004, p. 393).

And, of course, interacting with the environment causes changes in the mind and brain.  That's what learning is all about.  Moreover, we talk about the impacts of environmental interaction in the development of visual capacities in Chapter 9 of The Bounds of Cognition.  It's common ground that agents are transformed by their interactions with their niche.

Menary on the Point of the Ecological Turn

The point of the ecological turn in cognitive science is to show that there are deep consequences for our conception of cognitive agents once we consider their embodiment and embedding in an environment. The whole purpose of Adams and Aizawa’s arguments is to deflate those consequences, but you can’t do so just by assuming that agents are cognitive independently of their environmental embedding.  (Menary, 2010)

This comment I think confuses what is at issue.  A&A think it is fine to consider the embodiment and embeddedness of cognitive agents in environments.  That's the whole point of our concession to Sutton, et al., for example, and our point in the early pages of The Bounds of Cognition, that no one (short of Leibniz) doubts that cognitive agents are causally embodied and embedded in an environment.  This is the deflationary side of our view.

What we resist is not looking at brain-body-world interactions.  What we resist, among other things, is the claim that the same theory of cognition that applies to intracranial cognitive processes also applies to transcranial causal processes.  We resist what I have sometimes called a "fractal scaling" approach to brain-body-world interactions.  This is the idea that we have one and the same processes occurring at different scales of nature, in just the brain alone and in brain-body-world.  This is to resist the more familiar version of Clark's EC according to which what is going on in Inga's brain is roughly functionally equivalent to what is going on in Otto+notebook.

And, yes, there are versions of EC that abandon the fractal scaling idea and say that the intracranial processes do not have to be like the transcranial processes.  But, then what is the basis for saying that both are cognitive?  What is the advantage to cognitive science of doing this?  It would appear not to be some deep theoretical unity.  What is the advantage or theoretical insight in claiming that intracranial processes constitute cognition of one sort and transcranial processes constitute cognition of another sort?  Maybe, instead, it is just loose metaphorical talk.

Note that we do not just assume that agents are cognitive independently of their environmental embedding (where this claim is interpreted synchronically).  We have drawn attention to certain discoveries in psychology that provide a principled basis for saying that what takes place in the brain is plausibly construed as cognitive and is qualitatively distinct from what goes on in brain-body-world systems.  See, for example, section 4.2.1 of The Bounds of Cognition.  See much of the discussion in Chapter 9.  In chapter 9, for example, we discuss how it appears that agents can perceive perfectly well despite being completely immobilized by neuromuscular blockade.  As I've mentioned before, Gangopadhyay has written a very detailed empirically informed critique of Chapter 9.  She sees that there are empirical arguments to be met.