Consciousness Without Subjectivity, the PowerPoint from my Toward a Science of Consciousness 2008 talk, appears in my updated talks section. This represents the 20-25 minute version of the talk. The version I’ll be presenting at Churchlandpalooza in May is scheduled for a two-hour slot. A draft of the paper should materialize from the ether sometime June-ish.
Thanks, Franklin Scott, for emailing me the following:
I thought you’d appreciate this passage:
Never had a symptom. The pain came like a bullet out of the blue. I was alone when it started. My wife and my daughter had gone out. The pain is often described as the worst pain you can have. The pain was so severe that I would have welcomed anything to relieve it — including death. I wasn’t going to fight it. I look upon death as a part of living, just as some trees lose all their leaves in the winter and have them replaced in the spring. But at the same time, part of me was thinking, What caused this pain? Part of me was doing a diagnosis on myself — which, as it turned out, was correct. Aortic dissection. I’d written more articles about the condition than anybody in the world, and I resigned myself to having a heart stoppage. The pain didn’t teach me anything about the heart. It simply emphasized what I had already learned.
- Michael DeBakey, Heart Surgeon
February 28, 2008, Esquire
http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/michael-debakey-0308?src=rss
Josh Weisberg and I just finished a draft of a paper that my wife likes to call “Avenue Q Materialism” but Josh and I call “Type-Q Materialism” [link to draft].
Here’s a chunk:
As Gibson (1982) correctly points out, despite Quine’s brief flirtation with a “mitigated phenomenalism” (Gibson’s phrase) in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Quine’s ontology of 1953 (”On Mental Entities”) and beyond left no room for non-physical sensory objects or qualities. Anyone familiar with the contemporary neo-dualist qualia-freak-fest might wonder why Quinean lessons were insufficiently transmitted to the current generation. Chalmers (1996a, 2003a) has been a prominent member of the neo-dualists, though he does not leave Quine unmentioned. Neo-dualist arguments proceed by inferring from an epistemic gap between the physical and the phenomenal to an ontological gap between the physical and the phenomenal. Chalmers sorts various materialist responses to these arguments as follows: Type-A materialism denies that there’s any epistemic gap in the first place. Type-B materialism accepts that there is an epistemic gap, but denies that the epistemic gap entails any ontological gap. Type-C materialism is like type-B materialism except it thinks the epistemic gap in question is only temporary. Type-Q materialism (Q for “Quine”), according to Chalmers (2003a), rejects the kinds of distinctions needed to formulate both the neo-dualist arguments and the type-A , type-B, and type-C materialist responses to them. Such rejected distinctions include the conceptual vs. the empirical, the a priori vs. the a posteriori, and the contingent vs. the necessary. Chalmers (2003a, 123) charges Type-Q materialism with being incapable of avoiding the problems alleged to arise for the types from earlier in the alphabet. The aim of the current paper is to argue the contrary point that Quineans are inoculated against these so-called problems. We spell out how Quinean allegiance to holism and pragmatic criteria for ontic commitment protect Type-Q materialism from the complaints of the qualia-freaks.
The following is from an email announcement sent by Shaun Gallagher:
The special double issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (Vol 6, #1-2, 2007) on Dennett’s heterophenomenology, edited by Alva Noë, is available for free download until the end of March at http://www.springerlink.com/content/1568-7759.
The issue includes papers by Taylor Carman, Roberto Casati and Elena Pasquinelli, Jérome Dokic and Elisabeth Pacherie, John Drummond, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, Uriah Kriegel, Eduard Marbach, Alva Noë, Jean-Michel Roy, Eric Schwitzgebel, Charles Siewert, Gianfranco Soldati, Evan Thompson, Max Velmans, and Dan Zahavi; and a response by Dan Dennett.
Also the most recent issue (Vol. 7 #1, 2008), a special issue on Moral Phenomenology, edited by Uriah Kriegel, has just been published.
Benham’s Top or Benham’s Disk involves the elicitation of a perception of colors by a rotating stimulus that is itself only black and white. A terrific online demo is available at this link [here]. My own experience is that at relatively high speeds, the inner bands are yellowish and the outer bands are blueish. Reversing the direction of rotation results in the colors switching locations.
In his recent post “Echoes of Inner Speech“, Eric Schwitzgebel reflects on the phenomenological differences between inner speech and the apparently lingering non-speech thoughts that follow episodes of inner speech. As the comments to the post evidence, it’s natural to wonder here to what degree the various relevant mental phenomena - thoughts, etc. - are language like. How “speechy” is so-called inner-speech? How language-like are so-called non-speechy thoughts?
It strikes me as relevant to compare such phenomena to the phenomenon of a name on the tip of one’s tongue. There’s a clear sense in which the name is “there” even though it’s not there in the way it would be if you were silently saying the name to yourself. It’s also clear that what ever is “there” has to be pretty language-like, since what’s on the tip of the tongue is a name, after all.
Numbers of people (more than one) have asked for the following, perhaps because they are students in a class soon to be examined on the topics contained within. Others may be interested as well. Below are PowerPoint slides for talks closely associated with Chapter 5 & 6 of The Subjective Brain.
Transcending Zombies [link to download]
Phenomenal Consciousness and the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface [link to download]
Jennifer Matey gave a very nice talk at William Paterson University last week, “Visual Constancies and the Representational Nature of Visual Experiences”. Much of talk concerned issues contested between direct and representational realists about perception (with some side-notes about disjunctivists). An interesting methodological/metaphilosophical issue came up in the ensuing discussion (interesting to me, perhaps, because I was the one who brought it up). It goes something like this.
From a certain point of view it’s quite hard to see exactly what’s contested between the direct and the representational realist and it’s likewise hard to tell how to adjudicate the dispute. To get in the right frame of mind, imagine trying to explain the debate to a Rortyean Antipodean: a person who speaks a language a lot like English, though it’s shot through with a lot more neuroscientific vocabulary than most English speakers know and is utterly devoid of words like “perception”, “experience”, “awareness”, “consciousness”, and “qualia”. Imagine further that the Antipodean has come across a direct realist (DR) and a representationalist (R) in the process of examining a brain in a vat (Vatty) and its non-envatted neural doppleganger (Normy). Both R and DR agree that Vatty and Normy are in the same neural state when Normy is facing a tree with open eyes in a well-lighted environment. Both R and DR agree that that Normy but not Vatty is having a veridical experience of a tree. But what is it that they are disagreeingabout? And more to the point of this post, what could they say to the Antipodean to convince him to pick a side on this issue?
The Antipodean can see quite clearly that there are relational properties involving trees that Normy’s brain but not Vatty’s instantiates. And the Antipodean can see quite clearly that there are non-relational neural properties that Normy’s and Vatty’s brains have in common. What the Antipodean doesn’t get, is what else there might be to say here. Are DR and R fighting over which parts of the universe to draw a line around and apply the label “physical substrate of visual awareness” to? If so, why bother?
When I get in the Antipodean’s frame of mind I’m tempted to assert the following general methodological principle: if you can’t explain what you’re talking about to an Antipodean, then maybe you’re not talking about anything.
The following link is to the Mind Science Foundation’s page of video files of a debate concerning the neural correlates of consciousness between Susan Greenfield and Cristof Koch. [Link]
Philosopher Thomas Metzinger emailed me a bunch of cool stuff he’s doing with some neurosicentists to utilize virtual reality to induce out-of-body experiences.
From “The embodied self: Using virtual reality to study the foundations of bodily self-consciousness“:
The “I” one thinks of as “myself” is inextricably attached to one’s bodily location. In patients with certain neurological conditions this sense of spatial unity can break down, causing disturbing sensations such as out-of-body experiences in which the global self is localized outside one’s body limits (often called disembodiment).
Previous experiments have shown that people may attribute fake body parts to their own bodies. In the “Rubber Hand Illusion”, a person’s unseen hand is stroked synchronously with a visible fake hand, and then the person is asked to point to his own hand. Subjects invariably err in the direction of the fake hand, attributing it to their own bodies. Because the attribution does not involve the whole body, the sense of global bodily self-consciousness is not affected. EPFL Professor Olaf Blanke, graduate students Bigna Lenggenhager and Tej Tadi, and philosopher Thomas Metzinger hypothesized that the same approach could be used to study the concept of global bodily self consciousness by using a single, coherent body representation instead of just a body part.
See also:
New Scientist, “Out-of-body experiences are ‘all in the mind’”
New York Times, “Studies Report Inducing Out-of-Body Experience“.
