... Mr. Deacon demolishes fashionable computational theories of the brain. ¬Anyone in the future who is tempted to assert that "the mind is the software of the brain" should reflect on Mr. Deacon's observation that the apparent agency of a computer "is just the displaced agency of some human designer." The use of simplistic analogies to make the mind look machine-like and machines mind-like and thereby solve the mind-brain problem should never again pass unchallenged.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Getting things clear ...
... Book Review: Who's in Charge? | Incomplete Nature - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Raymond Tallis who writes the article is like the guy who smokes pot, but would never do cocaine or heroine. He twice uses parentheses in the beginning of the article to be sure that we all know that he truly believes that Darwinism explains how the brain came into being and that it "is an evolved organ, shaped by natural selection to ensure evolutionary success." He is firmly entrenched in the physical world and cannot see that we are primarily spritual beings who come from a spiritual source, that the brain is part of the physical realm that is derived from the spiritual realm where we live, believe, and even philosophize from. The meanings and explanations that different cultures place on the physical world, such as how Tallis uses evolution in the article, are more reflections of the culture, beliefs of convenience, what we get when the joint is passed around the room.
ReplyDeleteHe then tries to break from and overdose of biologism with the following:
For we belong to a boundless, infinitely elaborated community of minds that has been forged out of a trillion cognitive handshakes over hundreds of thousands of years. This community is the theater of our daily existence. It separates life in the jungle from life in the office, and because it is a community of minds, it cannot be inspected by looking at the activity of the solitary brain.
He's like a friend of Bill's. Even if you don't believe in God, there is a power greater than our individual selves that we each at times in our lives need to call upon. This conglomeration of minds, seems to derive from individual brains that knock together, mind to mind, in communities. Thus, Tallis likes it when he tells us about Terrence Deacon's book Incomplete Nature, such that it is worth exploration:
In his approach to the question of how sentience emerged from "dumb" and "numb" matter, Mr. Deacon mobilizes some radically new ideas, taking us back to thermodynamics to show how it might have happened. His key argument, developed over several hundred pages, centers on what he calls a "teleo-dynamic" system—a self-organizing system that "promotes its own persistence and maintenance" by modifying itself "to more effectively utilize supportive extrinsic conditions." He suggests how such a system might spontaneously arise out of thermodynamic processes, as predicted by chaos theory.
(cont)
ReplyDeleteBut because sentience never comes from dumb and numb matter, Tallis' explanation, as he understands it from Deacon, comes across as the mumbo jumbo we might hear after Deacon turned him onto some good shit in between Physics 101 and a class on the evolving science fiction novel. In order to go on with the novel, we have to buy the thermodynamic explanation, and enter into a suspenson of belief or reality. This is what happens when anyone tries to assert that consciousness comes from matter or mind comes from the brain. At least the hard core evolutionary biologists don't get involved with trying to say how this happens, in public anyway. They just say that it does, but leave the explanations to their evolutionary groupies.
Tallis breaks with Deacon and points out that, after all 500 pages, he never got around to showing how consciousness comes from matter, other than to suppose that neurons give rise to signals in some pivotal process. He goes on:
One of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology, Jerry Fodor, has argued that to solve the puzzle of conscious experience "there's hardly anything we may not have to cut loose from." Mr. Deacon has not cut loose from quite enough yet—in particular from the notion that matter organized in a certain way must be mindful—but he has started to reframe the terms of the discussion.
And Tallis has not cut loose from the impossibility of what is spiritual coming from what is physical. He shows us how he is holding onto his suspension of belief, there for us too see, and himself too, by his insertion of parentheses, which all writers know are used for stress. The reason it's so hard to explain, is that it is not so. People throughout time have tried to consider mind coming from matter, and no one, not one of all the smartest people from the past or who are alive today, has ever been able to show or explain how this could be. This is addressed in the hard problem of consciousness as framed by David Chalmers, something that Bryan blogged about a couple weeks back--and for some reason I cannot now get to the link. However, isn't it easy to consider how what is physical can come from the mental. We actually witness a process that would work whenever we dream, a simple idea that also goes back through all generations, when people have considered how the world could have come to be, how it could exist, and how it could possibly be self-sustaining. That which is spiritual creates that which is physical in order that that which is spiritual may observe it, among other things.