Brain Hammer

The ninth and final chapter of The Subjective Brain, “The Neurophilosophy of Subjectivity” is up.

Excerpt:

What, in the context of the philosophy of mind, is subjectivity? Subjectivity has something to do with consciousness, but it is not consciousness itself. Subjectivity has something to do with the so-called phenomenal character of conscious states, but it is not identical to phenomenal character. Subjectivity is an alleged property of phenomenal character, namely, the property of being one-way knowable. More specifically, the claim that phenomenal character is subjective is the claim that the only way to know some phenomenal character is by having a conscious experience that has that character. (This is a first pass and will be refined further later.) Whatever the relevant sense of “know” is here, it is the sense relevant to “knowing what it is like” to have some conscious experience.
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A neurophilosophical proposal such as Beaton’s constitutes an attempt to provide a reduction of subjectivity to aspects of neurophysiology insofar as it seeks to identify properties such as one-way-knowability with certain aspects of the functioning of the nervous system. A different neurophilosophical approach, and the one advocated in this chapter, is one that attempts to eliminate subjectivity by arguing (1) that there are no aspects of neural function with which so-called one-way-knowability can plausibly be identified and (2) no reason for maintaining a belief in the irreducible existence of subjectivity.

Chapter 8 of The Subjective Brain, “The Neural Accomplishment of Objectivity,” is up.

Excerpt:

Philosophical tradition contains two major lines of thought concerning the relative difficulty of the notions of objectivity and subjectivity. One tradition, which we might characterize as “Cartesian”, sees subjectivity as comparatively less problematic than objectivity. On the Cartesian view, what we know best of all are the contents of our own minds and the major problematic is to pierce the veil of appearances and make contact with objective mind-independent reality. In contrast is a line of thought that reverses the order of difficulty. A pervasive materialistic and scientific mind-set takes objectivity as the unproblematic starting point. From this point of view, widespread through much of contemporary philosophy and especially explicit in the philosophy of mind, a world of physical, chemical, and biological events is taken as relatively given. The problematic here then is to make sense of any kind of genuine subjectivity within this physicalistic framework.

One might expect neuroscientists and neurophilosophers alike to belong exclusively to this latter tradition, given their proclivity for seeing the mind as being intimately tied to, if not identical to, the brain—a physical thing presumably exhaustively describable in the objective idiom of physicalistic science. However, this is not so. Many practitioners of things neural count among adherents of what I have described as a Cartesian line of thought. This is especially clear when we recognize that the neural equivalent of the subjective/objective distinction is the egocentric/allocentric distinction. Egocentric representations, associated especially with activity in Posterior Parietal Cortex, code for things in “self-centered” reference frames. Allocentric representations (alleged by many to be involved in Hippocampal activity) in contrast, code for things in “other-centered” reference frames. Cartesians in neuroscience and neurophilosophy cast the egocentric as the relatively basic and unproblematic of the two sorts of neural representation. From this view, then, the allocentric is seen as especially difficult, and, under certain descriptions, impossible. My purpose in this chapter is to review and ultimately counter this Cartesian line of thought.