Brain Hammer

I was interviewed for a column appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal on an intriguing case of possible conscious states in a vegetative patient (“There May Be More To a Vegetative State Than Science Thought” by Sharon Begley).

In the case in question, scientists recorded brain activity in a vegetative patient in response to being asked to imagine playing tennis.

Remarkably, this made neurons fire in the premotor cortex, a region that hums with activity when you mentally practice sophisticated movement, from a jump shot to a backhand. Then they asked her to imagine walking through each room of her house. This time her parahippocampal gyrus, which generates spatial maps, became active, again just as in healthy volunteers.

I think that if the same activity also shows up in patients under general anesthesia, then that activity doesn’t suffice for consciousness. The proposal that people under general anesthetic are conscious after all is an intolerable skeptical hypothesis (do you really want to believe that people suffer their major surgeries?). Only a tiny bit of my point got into the article, though:

There also is the possibility that people in other mental states regarded as unconscious, such as patients under general anesthesia, may show similar brain activity, suggests philosopher Peter Mandik of William Paterson University, Wayne, N.J., who studies consciousness.

Lamme et al (1998) suggest that the responses elicited by stimuli in anesthetized animals constitute merely feed-forward activation of representations in perceptual networks and lack feed-back activations from representations higher in the processing hierarchy. I suggested (but it didn’t make it into the article) that a good case for consciousness in the vegetative patient could be made if the following was found in the vegetative but not anesthetized patients: reciprocal activity of higher-level representations (like abstract representations of tennis) and lower-level representations (like motor-representations in a body-centered reference frame) as in Mandik (2005).

(Cross-posted at Brains)

Update Sept. 12, 2006: On this elsewhere: @Mind Hacks; @Rebecca Skloot; @Milinda’s Questions.

References:
Begley, S. There May Be More To a Vegetative State Than Science Thought. Wall Street Journal September 8, 2006.

Lamme, V. A. F., et al. (1998). Feedforward, horizontal, and feedback processing in the visual cortex. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 8, 529 – 535.

Mandik, P. (2005) Phenomenal Consciousness and the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface. In: R. Buccheri et al. (eds.); Endophysics, Time, Quantum and the Subjective. World Scientific Publishing Co.

Richard (Red) Watson once said that “everyone wants Hume to be their daddy” and while I don’t recall the original context (a discussion of Jerry Fodor, perhaps?), I’ve always thought that was pretty funny.

Brain Hammer is back up after I took a break for a week in the UK doing stuff involving, e.g., sausages, scotch, and Hume. See, e.g., Figure 1.

Fig 1. Mandik and Hume in Edinburgh, Aug. 2006. Photo by Ray Gunn.

Tonight, in a secret basement in Brooklyn, is the third meeting of the rock band, The Neural Correlates of David Chalmers (NC/DC).

NC/DC’s all-philosopher line-up inlcudes Josh Weisberg, Pete Mandik, Peter Langland-Hassan, David Pereplyotchik, Russell Marcus, Jean-David Lafrance, Richard Brown, and Doug Meehan.

Band photgrapher Jared Blank posted some pics of our first session here.

Update (Sept. 1, 2006): NC/DC invades MySpace. See, hear, and feel the awesome.

Brain

Originally uploaded by Isaac Mao.

While Googling myself the other day I found that my paper Fine-grained supervenience, cognitive neuroscience, and the future of functionalism was referenced in the Wikipedia entry on functionalism, which is nice. Also nice is that the paper’s central argument (that functionalism entails mental-mental supervenience, which violates physicalism) is discussed at some length. However, that argument is presented as a major player in the formulation of certain versions of functionalism, which, though flattering, can only be possible if time-travel is actual.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from my paper:

[A]ccording to the bullet-biting functionalist, Searle’s rote rule following does give rise to genuine Chinese-understanding even though Searle himself seems not to understand Chinese. Likewise, the functionalist claims, Block’s nation’s walkie-talkie facilitated activities instantiate a mental event over and above the mental events of the individual citizens.

Such functionalist responses constitute an advocacy of mental-mental supervenience, which is to say that they allow for the possibility of a situation in which one mind or set of mental facts supervenes on another.

[…]

The possibility of mental-mental supervenience, however, poses a serious threat to theorists subscribing to the conjunction of the supervenience thesis and functionalism, because the possibility of mental-mental supervenience leads to a reductio ad absurdum of that conjunction. The key to the reductio is the fact that the possibility of mental-mental supervenience contradicts the supervenience thesis. Briefly, the supervenience thesis states that no mental differences can obtain without physical differences obtaining, but the possibility of mental-mental supervenience is the possibility of mental differences obtaining without physical differences obtaining.

So you’d like to… buy books on amazon.com containing chapters by Pete Mandik
A guide by Pete Mandik, Neurophilosopher and Mandikologist

“The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity.”

– Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 176.

I just received my gratis copies of Endophysics, Time, Quantum And the Subjective. One of the chapters is my Phenomenal Consciousness and the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface.

I just received my gratis copies of Cambridge University Press’ Paul Churchland edited by Brian Keeley. One of the chapters is my The Introspectibility of Brain States as Such.

Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement is out. I have a chapter and a half in it, including “Action Oriented Representation.”

Me update:

When I was at Caltech in June helping run the Neurophilosophy: The State of the Art Conference, I did a radio interview about consciousness and synthetic worms. It should hit the airwaves and web streams on Aug 20.

Also, for all those who just couldn't live without it, “An Epistemological Theory of Consciousness?” is back online.

What else? I would just like to take a moment to give a big shout-out to me. w00t! Hi me!

And now, syntethetic worms:

Figure 1. Synthetic Worms. Not conscious.

Amazon.com's list of Statistically Improbable Phrases from Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader:

narcissistic properties, representation producing processes, detection thesis, activation triplets, intertheoretic relations, explanatory pluralism, content bearers, messy properties, intrinsic representations, extrinsic representations, allocentric representations, intertheoretic reduction, reference fixers, route framework, sensory system functions, cortical visual pathways, egocentric representations, red experiences, neuron doctrine, prestriate cortex, pictorial perspective, perceptual symbols, middle temporal visual area, stimulus temperature, lesion research

In other news, Hebrew Neuron Parts: