Embodied Cognition and Consciousness Blog

Access consciousness and language

2008-05-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

Note - the explicit 'language based' representational code is not domain specific like the implicit 'cognitive mode' that is found in other primates, but has the domain-generality and interpenetrability that you find with 'access consciousness'; it is a general purpose representational format that is not anchored in particular implicit motive contexts (e.g. competition for food), or caching food in scrub jays (Clayton).

This intentional cognitive mode may also be much more closely associated with self-control based on normative standards - much more self-regulating in this sense, ultimately leading to the e.g. responsibility-bearing personhood, with emotions like guilt or pride, and self-esteem. Agency now has a social-normative core.

Implicit vs explicit goal-directed cognition

2008-05-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

In a previous blog entry, one stage of development was

It's at this stage perhaps that the conscious, self-regulating goal-directed self, with explicit motives, can begin to peel away from the 'pre-conscious' implicit, goal-directed self, with implicit motives. The former may be left-hemisphere lateralised.

Implicit motive driven cognition may be closer to pre-verbal, primate-typical, intentional cognition, with gesturing/body language-type communication and an action-based abstract 'ontology'. With human sophistication, the grain of communication and action may be finer, fast-acting and efficient.

Explicit motive systems may be built on top of this - involving the DLPFC and anterior cingulate (?) and new motivational systems.

This may also be related to the notion of 'access consciousness' in the sense of higher level, intelligent, rational, rule-based, action/cognition that is less anchored in (and confined to) particular implicit motives and associated ecological contexts (e.g. competition for food in chimpanzees), but is more general purpose.

Language is no doubt essential to this, being a hierarchical, recursive, goal-based, representational format that is not domain specific.

Types of intentionality

2008-05-28T11:40:00.001-07:00

4 types of intentionality, in order of phylogeny and ontogeny

1. IntentionalityA (action affordance) - abstract, program level, goal directed action based, shared content with multiple agents. (As we find in monkeys and apes). 6 months to 1 year of age.

2. IntentionalityO (particulars/object based) - concrete, indexical, particular, cause-effect, predicative, with multiple knowing agents who may be motivated to share information. Developmental stage of 'shared attention' at around 14 months and later pre-linguistic 'false belief' understanding at around 2 years of age (Southgate et al. 2007). Here we perhaps have unified 'access consciousness' and a shared, public world of particulars and states of affairs in a space-time continuum. Also the idea of the 'narrative self'. Here we have the right cognitive equipment and the right sort of cognitive ontology for language learning to take off. We also have notions of possession/ownership as well as sharing at this stage.

3. IntentionalityN (normative standards based) - actions, behaviour, practices, objects, etc, meaningful in terms of 'correctness' criteria operating in a social self-regulating way. Here we find an understanding of adopting norms or correct rules in a game, etc. Starting around 3 years of age.

4. IntentionalityI (intepretative/aspectual) - here, through more sophisticated language use and a meta-representational ability, there is an understanding of different senses or interpretations of the same objective state of affairs., mediated through language Here there is ability in language mediated false belief tasks, opacity tasks, and meta-cognitive tasks. 4-7 years of age. These abilities- one might argue - are all language mediated. Here we begin to grasp full 'folk psychology' to predict and understand others.

Phenomenology / intentionality

2008-05-28T11:24:00.000-07:00

One idea - the 'content' of the monkeys shared cognitive framework (mediated via mirror neuron systems) is inherently ACTION-BASED, not object based. Agents may be individuated and perceived as particulars, but the actions - set at the 'program level' are ABSTRACT, not particular. For non-human primates the 'shared ontology' of actions may thus be an abstract ontology, not an ontology of particulars - of this or that entity here and now (referred to by indexicals - or simply pointing - with humans). The 'shared cognitive system' evolves by becoming less and less abstract and increasingly concrete and particular. With humans we can share attention/cognition on particular, concrete objects, the perceptual objects of consciousness; -these entities are not abstract (although they may be categorized in abstract ways). Once there is shared attention to concrete particulars (and not abstract program-level actions) and processes, then there is - intuitively scope for causal experimentation / manipulation - with, perhaps, a parallel in the visuo-spatial scratch pad idea of working memory.

Intentionality

2008-05-28T10:38:00.001-07:00

Intentionality - Requires 'shared' representations - some 'language' of representational elements that are common to, mutually reinforce/constrain (and perhaps can be exchanged between) different 'cognitive systems' - the cognitive systems of different agents or individuals. It is this shared 'representational space' that grounds the 'objectivity' of the content within an 'epistemic or intentional community', and which is the basis for an awareness of different 'perspectives' (from different individuals) on that objective field or frame.

Notion of 'interpenetrability' of representations through different (agent's) cognitive systems. In imitation learning, for instance, more abstract 'program-level' action representations may be copied / exchanged between individuals. Perhaps also the following: a subordinate chimpanzee's goal directed actions may fit within a dominant chimp's goal directed action plans? We certainly see this in humans.

This can be seen in terms of the group as a whole having a self-regulating cognitive system based on shared 'intentional' representations and rules. This system - perhaps mediated by mirror neurons as a part of a more distributed frontal-parietal 'executive system' may have been 'group selected' in evolution (vs individual level selection).

Intentionality and motor planning

2008-05-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

Hypothesis: flexible, rational control over goal-directed action hierarchies has a basis in social cognition and is necessary for an intentional (Brentano-like) representational format.

'3 Modes of cognition': linguistic, cognitive and embodied

2008-05-25T08:10:00.001-07:00

Three hypothesized modes: 1. Language based - symbolic, public, intentional, syntactical. 2. 'Cognitive': pre-linguistic but nonetheless symbolic, abstact, discrete, intentional, hierarchical/ decomposable, and PUBLIC (with meaning and shared reference) - in part shared with ape higher cognition (goal directed, intelligent tool use, imitation learning, etc). 3. 'Embodied' - Connected, situated, dynamical (conditioning based, or affordance based), and non-intentional (in the philosophical sense).

Detachment

2008-04-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

Hypothesis: the more flexible cognitive control needed for the use of communicative gestures and language emerges - on one plausible account - with a dampening of emotional/motivational reactivity - related to activation of the limbic system and the amygdala perhaps. Similarly - and this is the hypothesis - this may be required for the ability to perceive objective states of affairs and their causal relationships: to adopt a 'rational stance' with respect to both mental and physical dynamics perhaps. Evidence for the former - Buttelmann et al.'s Encultured chimpanzees imitate rationally 2007 paper. In the wild they do not, while Orangutans do - why. The authors suggest: "orangutans are calmer and more observant than chimpanzees, or less governed by a need to get food rewards as directly as possible."

"Adult humans understand...that actors perceptually monitor the overall situation asthey pursue their goals, and choose plansof action that fit the opportunities andconstraints of the current situation; that is to say, they understand others' intentional actions rationally". This ability may exist in humans as young as 12 months. This is what Orangutans also seem able to do in the wild, and enculturated chimpanzees can do too!

Mirror neurons

2008-03-25T01:38:00.001-07:00

I think that what has sparked so much excitment with mirror neurons is the fact that they respond to the actions of others - the meaningful actions of others - in a social context. They direct attention to the individual embedded in a social context which in cognitive psychology is rare.

satisfaction and correctness

2008-03-15T01:32:00.000-07:00

I think there is a useful distinction to be drawn between these two types of ‘intentionality’ – the first is a type of ‘satisfaction’ condition, the lattera type of ‘correctness’ condition.

Type A.

Desire - satisfied/dissatisfied
Goal - attained/unattained
Problem - solved/unsolved
Competition - won/lost
Question - answered/unanswered
Task - completed/incomplete
Difficulty - resolved/unresolved
Fact - established/not established
Theory - confirmed/disconfirmed
Understanding - attained/unattained

And so on.

Type B

Belief/statement - true/false
Reasoning - valid/invalid
Behaviour - appropriate/inappropriate
Action - rational/irrational
Game playing - correct/incorrect
Object - valuable/worthless
Performance - good/bad
Action - moral/immoral
Institution - just/unjust
Situation - fair/unfair

Question: Do these regulative criteria/judgements develop together: is there a common developmental root?

Cognitive competences related to theory of mind.

2008-03-13T04:22:00.000-07:00

On the theory I've been develeping over the past year, there is the following progression of abilities: association > hidden cause tracking (may involve basic simulation) > normative standard 'content'/ intentionality > aspectual perspective taking > normative standard (deep) perspective taking.

It is only when we get to the aspectual perspective taking at around 6 years old that we get real 'theory of mind' on this view.

Normative standard intentionality is something that is not domain-specific to 'minds': it is externalist with respect to multiple domains - behavioural, mental, action, social practice, objects, tools, etc.

mental simulation and particulars

2008-03-09T07:21:00.000-07:00

Mental simulation/mental modeling - an aspect of causal reasoning - requires the representation of particulars, located in space and time as unique individuals.

Emergent consciousness

2008-03-09T00:21:00.000-08:00

Gell-Mann in this talk suggests that the human mind, like life itself, could be emergent - a product of laws and accidents. In the case of the human mind it could be an emergent property of the complexity of neo-cortex. The cerebellum - which is not involved in conscious awareness - has the same neuron density, but is not as interconnected as cortex: it is not as complex. I think the idea that consciousness is an emergent 'global' property is a more plausible than the ideathat it is a module, an exaption, an assembly and so on.

Gell-Mann's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/194

In the moment

2008-03-04T01:32:00.000-08:00

Hypothesis: the following competences develop together, perhaps around the 2nd year -

1. Ownership judgements.
2. A sense of autobiographical continuity through time.
3. Indexicality.
4. Exploratory causality-related manipulation of objects.

The intuition behind this is that here we see a sense of 'being in the conscious moment' - a moment that extends through autobiographical time.

Normative standards and objectification

2007-10-28T02:37:00.000-07:00

I'm now proposing is that what is unique to human cognition is their ability to objectify and use objectifying normative standards to guide thought and behaviour.

These 'normative standards' or 'normative virtues' (using Brain Cantwell Smith's term) include e.g. true-untrue (applied to beliefs), fair-unfair (applied to judgments), good-bad or praiseworthy-blameworthy (applied to actions), valuable-worthless (applied to objects).

The argument is that these norms and meta-cognition that works with them is unique to human beings. Chimps, for instance, don't feel pride or shame for doing something 'praiseworthy' or 'blameworthy'; they don't practice something to get 'excellent' at it, they don't strive to achieve 'true' beliefs, and so on. (Can you imagine a bunch of chimpanzees screaming at another chimpanzee for being responsible for getting them lost somewhere?)

Here's a simple point:

Evolution of adaptive traits can be either originate from:

Social competition = individual level selection

OR:

Social cooperation (and intergroup competition) = group level selection

On my theory, the evolution of human-unique intelligence mechanisms (e.g. planning, inhibition, working memory, decision-making in the pre-frontal lobe) is driven by normative virtues (e.g. fair vs unfair, good-bad) IN INTERACTION with underlying implicit motives (e.g. dominance, affiliation), acting in a socially cooperative (group selection) or competitive (individual selection) context.

Thus some of the normative virtues - being 'good'/'excellent', doing things that are 'praiseworthy', and wanting to possess 'valued' objects, naturally align themselves with competitive - e.g. dominance/power primate motives; other normative virtues - being 'fair', being 'good', being 'righteous' naturally align themselves with cooperative - e.g. affiliative primate motives.

Now here is where it gets interesting. These normative virtues are objectifying - unlike the implicit motives that might fuel them. This makes group level ideologies/religions so potentially dangerous - because there is such a conviction of the 'absolute truth' in certain beliefs, gods, moralities, religious narratives, etc.

However, and this is what makes human intelligence and cognition really transcendent, normative virtues - due to their intrinsic objectified nature - can become genuine ends in themselves, detached from individual or group level interests. For instance, wanting to find understanding or truth or justice beyond the group level - but at some 'universal' level. Or wanting to do things according to standards of 'excellence' or 'perfection' even when this motive conflicts with personal/social level interests.

It is this latter characteristic that seems so exceptional and marvellous in our species in my view. And cultures that encourage it (e.g. elite culture in classical Greek times, perhaps Buddhist cultures, and liberal arts traditions in western cultures) are a wonderful accomplishment - unlike e.g. modern nationalistic capitalism, which increasingly encourages competitive, instrumental self-interest, group-focused 'morality', and hypocrisy!

I suppose, this is where Socrates' dictate: 'Know yourself' comes in. If you don't apply it, you end up 'reifying' evaluations that simply project implicit competitive or cooperative motives that we share with other primates.

Theory sketch of consciousenss

2007-08-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

Children prior to about 9 months are not conscious.

Consciousness is a biological adaptation that in ontogeny begins to emerge at 9-12 months when infants first experience shared attention to common objects and shared intentions towards common goals. Consciousness is a function that triangulates on common objects and goals, using shared attention mechanisms. It thereby 'objectifies' - it opens up a realm of shared objects and goals and norms and values in a public realm. It also 'subjectifies' by opening up the corollary realm of self-directed agency and subjectivity and selfhood. Consciousness is inherently dualistic.

Rationality of the flexible, strategic, and explicit sort, is a bridge between these two realms of objectivity (worldhood) and subjectivity (selfhood). Rationality operates by normative principles (deduction, inference, truth) with objective content (facts), relating this objective realm to the subjective realm of preferences and desires.

You can imagine what sort of adaptive value having these dual realms of ‘world’ and ‘self’ could confer on a species! This is another topic in itself.

Discursive rationality is built into the structure, content and pragmatics of language. Causality, logical form, and the dualistic ontology of agent/subject/self and object/fact/world is built into the medium of language to facilitate the coherent and intelligent relationship of the two in adaptive behaviour.

Consciousness, explicit rational thought, and language - I hypothesize - co-evolve together, but for rational thought and language to get hold, they need a pre-rational, pre-linguistic kind of shared attention based consciousness.

These co-evolving adaptations emerge as a GROUP level adaptation, not an individual level adaptation. They are all inherently social/relational; they COULD NOT be selected at an individual level. Consciousness as 'shared world' is not something that can be understood as an individual-level adaptation. The idea of group selection is very important here. Hominoid groups in the Upper Palaeolithic (40-30,000 years ago), I proposes, competed in terms of 'group consciousness'; different groups were engaged in different 'conscious worlds' - the 'more' conscious groups tended to survive and reproduce relative to the less conscious groups. (Imagine this in terms of language - but the key is to think of consciousness as a group level adaptation that enables the evolution of language).

Animals don't have these dual realms; they therefore don't have autonomy and selfhood, nor do they have objectivity, a 'world' that they are in and act on as 'selves' or agents. They live in an unconscious realm of 'affordances' - a 'soup' in which the world and self have not been separated out. They don't initiate actions deliberately, they don't act ON anything; they are in a flux of doing and sensing and feeling of an automatic, pre-conscious sort. One could perhaps imagine this pre-human realm as consisting of free-floating 'sensation' states, but we cannot imagine what this would be like, since our world is inherently intentional (involving an awareness of 'aboutness' in perception or 'directedness' in action). Other animals cannot triangulate on and fix 'objects' into 'being' with shared attention mechanisms.

Prior to the human child becoming 'self conscious' - of private thoughts and intentions and desires (as well perhaps of emotions, pains, etc) - the child is simply conscious, and this consciousness is OF external 'common' objects, and external 'common' goals or objects of intention. This kind of consciousness is inherently dualistic - separating out 'a world' from 'selves' acting on or perceiving the world - but the child is not yet aware of this dualism in a reflective, self conscious sense. The reflective sense of awareness comes at around 4. But at a phenomenological level, the experience of the 2 year old is already conscious, i.e. dualistic. There is inherent awareness of agency and selfhood, as well as public objecthood. There is inherent intentionality (in the sense of ‘aboutness’ or ‘directedness’). This intentionality in early infant experience is the 'consciousness' adaptation - the product of group selection.

It is also at around 9-12 months old that language ability begins to emerge, as well as - I hypothesise – the rudiments of flexible, discursive, thought-based, rationality and planning.

Normative Standards

2007-06-30T02:05:00.000-07:00

To quote from Cantwell Smith's 'On the Origin of Objects':

"Normative virtue - Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this entire picture of life in the middle, even more than the shifting patterns of connection and disconnection and of sameness and difference that sustain a configuration of subjects and objects, has to do with the normative standards that govern the whole process...with what notions of truth or beauty or goodness or virtue or fidelity are appropriate to this mediate...way of life." (p. 304)

He continues...

"the ability to register - the ability to make the world present, and to be present in the world, which is after all what this is a thoery of - requires that one inhabit one's particular place in the deictic flux, and participate appropriately in the enmeshing web of practices, so as to sustain the kinds of coordination that make the world come into focus with at least a degree of stability and clarity." (p. 305-6)

This echoes a lot of the stuff I've been interested in recently. I'm excited about doing this factor analysis of normative values, making good use of Osgood's Measurement of Meaning.

Emerging Minds

2007-06-25T23:24:00.000-07:00

In Robert Siegler's book 'Emerging Minds', he argues that the variability of children's thinking indicates that stage-like 'essentialist' development models are misleading. He says, "When children are depicted as only having a single way of representing a situation, thinking about a concept, or solving a problem, there are no choices to be made. They are, in a sense, the slaves of their cognitive structures. In contrast, if they possess multiple ways of performing these cognitive activities, then they must choose which one to use in each situation." (p. 4)

What excites me about this is the clear connection highlighted between cognitive development (and I would argue - the development of consciousness) and autonomy - the connection that is the current focus of my research.

What happened to drive the explosion of culture in the Upper Paleolithic?

2007-06-25T23:14:00.000-07:00

This is a puzzle that may throw light on the emergence of human consciousness. The problem is presented by R. Quinlan nicely here.

One hypothesis is that true symbolic thinking emerged at this time (40,000 years ago), enabling all that cultural creativity. Perhaps here we see an emergence of imagination qua 'metarepresentation' in Baron-Cohen's sense. On my account this would have been associated with the emergence of consciousness. And we see a close link with autonomy and consciousness here. (Perhaps there could be an embodied cognition argument here, connecting these two?) Prior to this time, there was - I propose - no human conscious, rational autonomy, only biological automation. What the data suggests to me is that since cranial size is not correlated with the cultural explosion (see the lower graph), cultural interactions were essential for the emergence of consciousness. Consciousness is not a biological given, but its biological potentiality needs to be teased out through cultural learning, much as a child’s awareness of the world requires cultural learning. So I suppose I’m more in favour of the cultural ‘critical mass’ hypothesis that is mentioned.

Embodied cognition

2007-06-14T00:17:00.000-07:00

“He who considers things in their first growth and origin …will obtain the clearest view of them.” Aristotle.

Thinking in terms of ORIGINS of capabilities in this way is an embodied approach to cognition.

Also, looking at cognition from the point of view of ACTION, rather than KNOWLEDGE reflects and embodied approach. My embodied take on this is to see cognition through the lens of the specifically human capability of AUTONOMY.

Self, world and time

2007-03-29T00:53:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting article entitled 'Extending Self-Consciousness Into The Future':
http://jbarresi.psychology.dal.ca/Papers/Barresi_chapter.htm

My point is that just as a conception of a self extended through time (unified over time) emerges at around 4 years of age, so does a conception of a world extending in time. The focus in most of this research is on what goes on 'in the mind'. My proposal is that what goes on 'in the mind' is mirrored in what goes on 'in the world'. Just as a 'unified consciousness' emerges, extended in time and space, so a 'unified world' emerges, extended in time and space. Just as the notion of one's own and other's 'representations' of reality emerges, so the very notion of an external reality - of 'the facts' - emerges. The inner and the outer co-emerge.

There are two forms of dualism. The mind-body one. But there is also one between 'reality' and 'mind' or 'inner' and 'outer'. We are tempted to assume that reality is a given and then talk about how the mind develops within it. My suggestion is that the two co-evolve. If human consciousness hadn't emerged, there would be no conception of a temporally extended real world with real objects and events; there would be no 'facts' to know. Cognitive abilities bring with them different realities, different possibilities for learning and exploring and acting. The conscious world uncovers a 'real world' - one that persists and acts independently of us, and which we can learn to know and control or simply reflect on and appreciate. Other creatures have no sense of this. They have no 'real world' they are in!

Here is a prediction based on this theory. The emergence of conceptions of a self extending through time (and the self as one of multiple perspectives which can also be extended in time) will be positively correlated with the emergence of conceptions of an enduring world - a home, a community, a neighbourhood, or perhaps even a cosmos with stars and a sun and moon - that extends in time and in which the child becomes aware he is located. I predict that around 4 years old the first questions concerning birth and death may arise, or at least the first conceptions of the origins and temporal trajectories of objects and individuals in the world. Here we will find the first conceptions that there is a world or cosmos, and other people, that exists independently of the self and within the context of which the self exists through time.

Developing thoughts on consciousness : objectivity and subjectivity

2007-03-03T07:31:00.000-08:00

The following has been pinched from my e-mails to Radu after giving a talk on consciousness yesterday.

My view says that normative criteria are at the heart of human consciousness; these anchor consciousness in some sphere of 'objectivity' which standard functionalist accounts don't do justice to as far as I can tell. When we act rationally, we act according to what we see as OBJECTIVE grounds, the rightness of which is in some sense public and publicly justifiable; similarly when we get angry at others, we often believe that there is an OBJECTIVE ground for the anger - that that person OUGHT not have done that. Such 'oughts' and 'justifications' are inherently public and normative; they aim at 'objectivity' in some sense. This 'oughtness' seems to be lacking in functionalist accounts of rationality.

Think of life in Bilkent: we believe that certain STANDARDS should be upheld (regarding governance, infrastructure, norms, etc). We are continually judging our experience by such standards, and motivating our lives by such standards. This activity is at the heart of human consciousness in my view.I don't think a human could be conscious without notions of standards, without 'oughts'. Consciousness is inherently intersubjective. Our language presupposes this, as does culture - so I'd say intersubjective meaning, intersubjective objects of thought, and intersubjective 'selves' (viewing the self as one among many in a public space) are all foundational in consciousness. My view is that 'objectivity' in 'intersubjective space' is at the root of consciousness.

One can have all sorts of sophisticated cognition and metacognition without this but without it one would not be conscious.

My view is that this kind of 'rational world' emerged with consciousness and constitutes another 'ontological realm' beyond the functionalist/ biological realm. Another way of putting it: OBJECTIVITY and SUBJECTIVITY both co-evolved with consciousness; OJBECTS came into being, as did OUGHTS and NORMS and PRINCIPLES etc that intersubjectively ground behaviour in an 'objective sphere'.

For the notion of ontological realms see my talk here.

We are used to thinking that 'subjectivity' is something the comes with consciousness. But here is another way of thinking about it:

Both OBJECTIVITY and SUBJECTIVITY co-evolved with consciousness; subjectivity implies objectivity after all.

Public OJBECTS came into being, as did OUGHTS and NORMS and PRINCIPLES etc. that intersubjectively ground behaviour in an 'objective sphere'.

This accounts for the emergence around the age of 4 of 'theories of mind' in as far as both 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity' arise at this time. It's not just that the child knows that he/she has a mind, and that their mind is one of many; it is also that there are objective things that different minds can have different perspectives on: both subjectivity and objectivity arise at this time.

I would predict that around the same time children acquire notions of 'objective' standards for what is 'good' or 'bad', 'acceptable' or 'unacceptable' - all those normative 'oughts' that - like objects - are located in a shared intersubjective, public space (albeit, non-material) that can be appealed to in a TRANSCENDENT way (e.g. that's not FAIR, where fairness is understood as something 'objective'; because in an emergent ontological sense it IS objective).

Jung's collective unconscious

2007-02-25T17:55:00.000-08:00

Jung applies Kant's idea of transcendent a priori categories of thought to his concept of archetypes it looks like.

"[the universal motifs of myths] have their origin in the archetype, which in itself is an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at anytime."

"The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal...a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in form only."

"It seems to me probable that the real nature of the archetype as such is not capable of being made conscious, that it is transcendent, on which account I call it psychoid."

"[The personal unconscious] comprises contents which are integral components of the individual personality and therefore could just as well be conscious; the second group forms, as it were, an omnipresent, unchanging, and everywhere identical quality or substrata of the psyche per se."

"The deeper 'Layers' of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness."

Above quotes from the glossary of Memories, Dreams, Reflections - C.G. Jung

Jung on consciousness

2007-02-25T17:45:00.000-08:00

"When one reflects upon what consciousness really is, on eis profoundly impressed by the extreme wonder of the fact that an eventwhich takes place outside in the cosmos simultaneously produces an internal image, that it takes place, so to speak, inside as well, which is to say: becomes conscious." Carl Jung, Basel seminar, privately printed, 1934, p. 1)

levels of analysis

2007-02-18T08:21:00.000-08:00

In the last philosophy of mind seminar Radu was contrasting the way that consciousness seems to 'fix' or 'crystallize' time, while the physical substrate of the mind was always in a flux. I suggested that another 'layer' might be interposed between the 'physical' and the 'mental' - namely the 'biological' which consists not in a continuous physical flux of matter and energy, but of enduring networks and patterns - such as memory traces in neural networks in the brain - which raise the issue as to what temporal extents can we be conscious of. Could we be 'conscious' - in the sense of aware/sentient of, a pattern that extends over several hours or days, or even years? It strikes me that this 'temporal' aspect of consciousness seems very important, and I'm grateful to Radu for picking it up on the radar of his course. This idea of a 'functional' level of analysis - a level appropriate to living things - was one that Radu seemed in agreement with. Traditionally mind is often contrasted with 'matter' in a way that neglects the biological level which is neither 'mind', nor 'matter' - where matter is understood in physical, mechanical terms.

Physical and biological constraints on cognition

2007-02-14T05:17:00.000-08:00

Kleiber’s law in biology states that the specific metabolic rate (metabolic rate per unit mass) scales as M– 1/4 in terms of the mass M of the organism. A paper by ARP Rau looks at this law. In the article he states:

Thus, the rich variety and diversity in biology, including of scaling exponents, has been used to dismiss the search for underlying causes simply as physicists’ hubris. This stance is untenable because, notwithstanding the diversity, there is far too much evidence as already noted from widely disparate biological systems for scaling laws, many of them with the (– 1/4) power. On the other side, it is also an overreach to argue too generally, claiming the same power law for “everything”. This is not how physics fits into biology. Rather, physics comes in especially “at the edges” in constraining the limits into which biological organisms fit since they too are subject to the laws of physics.

What is remarkable about the biological world is that within such limits set by physics, most niches in between seem to have been explored, if not occupied, during the course of biological evolution. A more modest approach, therefore, and the spirit in which this note is advanced, is to see what constraints are set by geometry and by physical laws that are expected to be relevant, and then see what some of the observed biological scalings further imply. (p. 477)

This reflects my thinking on this: physical laws constrain biological phenomenon. They open a 'space of possibilities' and most regions within this space have been explored (or currently occupied) by the evolutionary process.

An interesting speculation is how physics and physiology might constrain possible 'perceptual' or 'representational' or 'cognitive' (in a broad sense) systems. One might suggest - analogously - that given the constraints imposed by biology, which is in turn constrained by physics, there is a space of possible 'epistemic' systems, and most of these have been explored by evolution. The idea of 'cultural evolution' may be a way of extending this idea.

What are we conscious of? 2

2007-02-12T01:44:00.000-08:00

This article by Alva Noë does a good job in explaining my intuition expressed in the last blog. It takes an 'enactive' approach to visual Alva perception, and places emphasis on sensori-motor skills, and being aware of detail on a 'need to know' basis.

http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/NOE.PDF

What are we conscious of?

2007-02-11T11:49:00.000-08:00

Prof. Radu Bogdan proposed the following schema in last Friday's philosophy of mind seminar: a mental representation [has a] content [which is about] a target. He suggested that we were conscious of contents, not targets. This seems like a curious claim. Aren't we aware of objects of knowledge - objects that exist with objective properties - rather than our mental representations. For instance, we don't see ellipses when we see coins lying on tables, we see coins which are circular. When we dream in a sense we see only 'mental contents' but when we perceive (successfully) we do not: we see the object of perception. It's like using our hands to feel the shape of something; our eyes are used to inform us of objective properties of our environments.

It's not altogether clear to me how to draw the distinction between contents and targets in fact. There must be research on this: what are we generally aware of: objects and their objective properties, or representations and their content? My feeling is that if we went around being aware of contents and not things, we'd be suffering from something like 'derealisation', the clinical condition.

Example of non-physical models for goal-directed processes

2007-02-10T06:37:00.000-08:00

Here is an example of a kind of modelling language for an information-based / 'cognitive' process that is fundamentally non-physical (or 'extra-physical') in the sense that it involves the notions of 'goal state' and 'feedback'. It is not simply a causal mechanism; it incorporates a design. The diagram is from Susan Hurley's The Shared Circuits Model:How Control, Mirroring and Simulation Can Enable Imitation, Deliberation, and Mindreading [text]. You see similar types of models in Carver and Scheier's work - e.g. 'On the Self-Regulation of Behaviour'. Cybernetics type models.

Realism and ways of world-making...

2007-02-10T01:13:00.000-08:00

"Some dynamicists are anti-Piagetian, rejecting representation and realism, in favour of ‘world making’. Cognitive scientists in general allow that different creatures – including humans of different ages or historical periods – inhabit different environments to the extent that they (subjectively) represent different objects of the same (objective) world. But these dynamicists reject the subject-object distinction and the realism associated with it (Haugeland in press). Stressing the close dynamic coupling between organism and environment they argue that ‘environments’ are wholly constituted by world-embedded activities of the creatures concerned: there is no such thing as an organism-independent, objectively real world. Based on ideas by Heidegger."

Where this quote comes from I don't know, but it expresses an 'ontological' view - a conception of the relationship of the mind to the 'external world' it interacts with - that I was attracted to as a graduate student in Pittsburgh. It is an idea that seems to flow naturally from 'embodied cognition' accounts of our mental life. It is found in work by Maturana and Varela. It is found in commentaries on their work by Fritjof Capra in his 'The Hidden Connections'. To quote from this book:

"Cognition is the very process of life. The organizing activity of living systems, at all levels of life, is mental activity. The interactions of a living organism - plant, animal or human - with its environment are cognitive interactions. Thus life and cognition are inseparably connected. Mind - or, more accurately, mental activity - is immanent in matter at all levels of life....

The structural changes in the system constitute acts of cognition. By specifying which perturbations from the environment trigger changes, the system specifies the extent of its cognitive domain; it 'brings forth a world', as Maturana and Varela put it.

Cognition, then, is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living. The interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive interactions, and the process of living itself is the process of cognition." (p. 32)

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But now - a decade on - I am coming round to a solid realist position concerning both the physical world and mental life. Reading Roy Bhaskar's 'A Realist Theory of Science' has been influential in this transition. My working assumption these days is that physical scientists attempt to know about "the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world and they are for the most part quite independent of us...They are intransitive, science-independent, objects of scientific discovery and investigation." (RTS, p. 22) The intelligibility of experimentation assumes such realism. Bhaskar contrasts his transcendental realism with classical empiricism and transcendental idealism. Transcendental realism (now commonly called critical realism) "It regards the objects of knowledge as the structures and mechanisms that generate phenomena... these objects are neither phenomena (empiricism) nor human constructs imposed upon the phenomena (idealism), but real structures which endure and operate independently of our knowledge, our experience and the conditions which allow us access to them." (RTS, p. 25)

The way I want to develop (and possibly redirect) this realist conception of science is to introduce another realm of the real and intransitive (human independent, enduring) 'structures, mechanisms, processes' etc. This realm would be - and this is the twist - precisely that identified by Maturana and Varela as the world of life-cognition. Wherever there is representation, adaptive design, function, communication, information, meaning: wherever there is this content-based realm, which I take to be intrinsic all life forms including the most simple. This 'psychic' realm - like the physical realm - has different (emergent) levels or orders of regularity, from molecular representations of single celled organisms to moral norms in human societies - each drawing on different conceptual systems to describe them scientifically, to model them. But as with the physical sciences, there exist intransitive and real mechanisms, real processes. But they are not PHYSICAL. They emerge from physical mechanisms and processes - their existence is dependent on the physical; they physical is necessary - but they are a fundamentally different domain of mechanism and process - a functional or informational or meaning-laden representational realm - with its own causal laws and regularities that are not reducible to physical, or bio-chemical processes.

So I would call myself a realist with respect to not only physical mechanisms but also cognitive/psychic mechanisms. We conduct experiments to discover real intransitive mechanisms that can be both content/information based (if we are biologists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, etc) or physical (if we are geologists, chemists, physicists, etc). The former emerge from the latter, and the latter can be analysed to uncover physical pre-conditions for the existence of the former, but the former involves a different realm of mechanistic laws that cannot be reduced to the natural laws of physics or chemistry. Causal relations between these two realms is interactive and bi-directional. Physical mechanisms - e.g. relating to a bullet being shot through the brain - can clearly impact on cognitive mechanisms, but cognitive mechanisms - e. g. intentional actions such as the motive and decision to shoot the gun - can clearly impact on physical mechanisms. The intuition behind the cliche 'mind over matter' reflects this fact. But 'cognitive' influence on matter is clearly not simply confined to conscious, intentional cognition. It extends to all functional adaptation, communication, information processing, etc, in all branches of the evolutionary tree. The nests of the weaver bird, the dams of otters, not to mention weaver bird and otter physiology and anatomy, are all shaped by the realm of meaning and information. Recent brain imaging experiments by neuroscientist Pascual-Leone have demonstrated that simply imagining piano exercises expanded the territory of the motor cortex in the participant's cortices! Living organisms are made of matter - stuff that can be weighed and is subject to the laws of physics -but the matter, as well as the matter in their ecological niches, is continually being reshaped by the realm of meaning and information.

This 'meta' framework for understanding our work, shakes up the idea that Darwin's theory of evolution is 'just mechanical' - as though one were simply talking about balls rolling down slopes. Evolution involves information, meaning, communication, representations, cognition. It involves the realm of the psyche! Perhaps we could call this realm 'Logos' - an active, creative and intelligent principle, intrinsic to all life and life's impact on its physical environment.

And here is another way of thinking about this emergent living realm:

"In the languages of ancient timess, both soul and spirit are described with the metaphor of the breath of life. The words for 'soul' in sanskrit (atman), Greek (psyche), and Latin (anima) all mean 'breath'. The same is true of the words for 'spirit' in Latin (spiritus), Greek (pneuma), and Hebrew (ruah). These, too, mean 'breath'.

The common ancient idea behind all these words is that of soul or spirit as the breath of life. Similarly the concept of cognition (here) goes far beyond the rational mind, as it includes the entire process of life. Describing cognition as the breath of life seems to be a perfect metaphor." (Capra, The Hidden Connections, p. 32)