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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Out of Our Minds

Hey, Folks!

As a first post on this spiffy new blog... is anyone familiar with the book Out of Our Minds by Cal Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë? Here's an excerpt from an interview he did with Salon... and if I'm not deluded I think what he says here seems either "Peircian" or in the ballpark, as far as mentality and the inner versus outer shag-nasty dilemma...

Imagine that we find the Holy Grail of neurobiology, the patterns of neural activation that correlate perfectly with different events in our mental lives. We would still never understand or make sense of why those correlations exist. There is no intrinsic relationship between the experience and the neural substrates of the experience. We always need to look at what factors bring the two together. The environment, other people, our needs and desires -- all these things exist outside the brain and have to be seen as essential parts of our selves and consciousness. So we aren't just our brains, we're not locked inside our craniums; we extend beyond our skulls, beyond our skin, into the world we occupy.

...and further along...

Seeing is a certain way of relating to the world around you; the brain plays a critical role in supporting that relation. It's not revealing something about the cells themselves -- or the way they are firing -- that does the explanatory work. Rather, it's understanding the way the cells participate in a larger interaction with the world that will shed light on what it is to see. This is a whole new way of approaching the problem. The "it's all in your brain" approach doesn't work. If we expand our idea of the machinery of mind to include the body and the world, whole new ways of thinking about and explaining consciousness come into view.

The whole interview is located here...


5 comments:

gnox said...

You could say it's in the Peircean ballpark, but then you'd also have to say it's a very large ballpark, including Hilary Putnam, Lakoff and Johnson, Andy Clark, Merleau-Ponty, Francisco Varela and bog knows who else.

I'm inclined to think that most everyone who takes up the "all in the brain" question is looking at it from the wrong end. The fact is, we are interested in what happens in the brain mainly because we are primed to see its activation patterns as correlated with experience, and this abduction is constantly reinforced by correlation between observations of brain activity and the experience reported by its owner (or with his observable behavior). But for the observer, the brain is part of the external world. The methods we use to explore the workings of the external world can never "explain" why you or anybody has a world to explore in the first place; that's a metaphysical question rarely recognized as such. Peirce simply said that consciousness is the view from within of what appears from without as matter. I don't think that way of looking at it has been much improved since; all the brain research going on is based on it, but tacitly so.

Ben Udell said...

I remember when at age 19 I took a course on Merleau-Ponty, it made a big impression on me. I read him over and over. But something else which I noticed was that, for instance, in arguments about the influence of nature versus that of nurture, nobody seemed to talk about the influence of logic -- logic, in the sense of reasoning, seemed like a third force to me. One can talk about reasoning's dependences on culture, but still some things depend on logic. And if somebody is producing proofs in number theory, then you won't be able to predict what he or she will do unless you know number theory, even better than that person knows it, because proofs in number theory are part what is determining the outcomes. (Sometimes in physical questions one finds mathematical explanations, mathematicaal "causes," e.g., of thermodynamic irreversibility, but that doesn't seem quite the samee thing.) Now take the example of logic and multiply it by a million, becase considerations of the strong, the fitting, the good, the true, in myriad degrees of generality and abstraction, influence a person. I came to like Peirce quite a lot because such thinking seems very compatible with his. If you take everything non-singular and call it a "useful fiction," then it's a cheap trick to call many human concerns mere constructs or illusions.

Almost instinctively I've taken to turning the tables and suggesting that materialist talk about the mind involves taking too seriously the handy lingo of neural and psycholoical research and that such talk is a research artefact, almost an epiphenomenon.

Alva Noë says:

"What makes a certain pattern of brain activity a conscious perceptual experience has nothing to do with the cells themselves, or with the way they are firing, but rather with the way the cells' activity is responsive to and helps us regulate our engagement with the world around us."

I think that that's an exaggeration, If what makes a certain pattern of brain activity a conscious perceptual experience has to do with the way the cells' activity is responsive to and helps us regulate our engagement with the world around us, then contary to what he says, cells themselves, or with the way they are firing, has something to do with it too.

I think that Noë is quite right that the appeal of materialist explanations is often that they would mean that things are not what they seem. Like a person sneering at his or her own experience, ha, I see through you, you phony!

Jeff Grace said...

Well, thank you gentlemen, for your responses and comments. I am intrigued by the little bit we hear from Noë in that interview, so I am diving into his book which has arrived today...

Ben Udell said...

Regular updates, please!

Jeff Grace said...

You got it! (Damn... now I have to finish the thing...)