It's one thing to say you wouldn't be you if not for your brain, that your brain is critical to what you are. But I could say that about your upbringing and your culture, too. It's another thing entirely to say that you are your brain...
I don't reject the idea that the brain is necessary for consciousness; but I do reject the argument that it is sufficient. That's just a fancy, contemporary version of the old philosophical idea that our true selves are interior, cut off from the outside world, only accidentally situated in the world...
Consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context. And to really understand it, you'd have to study it that way...
The dominant view in neuroscience today represents us as if we were strangers in an alien environment. It says that we go about gathering information, building up representations, performing calculations and making choices based on that data. But in reality, when we get up in the morning we put our feet on the floor and start to walk. We take the floor for granted and the world supports us, houses us, facilitates us and enables us to carry on whatever our tasks might be. That kind of fluency, that kind of flow, is, I think, a fundamental feature of our lives. Our fitting into the world is not an illusion created by our brains, it's a fundamental truth about our nature....
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
The Environmental Brain
An interview in Salon with Alva Noë on the nature of consciousness. Noë says what seems right on to me, and a view of mind that largely went to the back-burner after the death of William James. That is, even if there is a correlation between physical brain activity and certain parts of experience, consciousness cannot be reduced to mere electro-chemical processes in the physical brain. The going neurobiological reductionism has long had it that brain and mind are basically the same thing - understand the brain and we understand the mind. Consciousness, however, is not a synaptic experience of electrical charges themselves. On Noë's and others' view, it is what you're experiencing around you right now - sense-perception, thought, ideas, emotions, external resistance - all of which are only possible in the engagement with the environment around us. Noë's claim is that the reductionist view of the brain as a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness has led research on consciousness astray. Conscious experience is instead an interactive and relational collaboration of brain, environment, and a person's ongoing life activity for which the brain is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
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I just don't see what's especially troubling about consciousness in this regard. How is consciousness any less essentially or completely explicable in terms of neurons than a river or a glass of water is explicable in terms of water molecules in their setting? I might have more to say after I read the interview, although I read one of Noe's paper's awhile back and was neither stirred nor shaken.
Here's another analogy, I think, to Noe's point, which illustrates it's superfluousness. A flame is environmental. It depends on the availability of oxygen and fuel, which way the wind is blowing and how hard. So we can not reduce a flame to the chemical activity within the glowing zone atop a match head. And yet we do with the words flame and fire themselves. It's legitimate--pragmatic--that we believe in these categories of phenomenon, even though they cease to be pragmatic in the hypothetical microscopic perspective at which we have some tools of chemistry to use. The truth of relativity and quantum mechanics create no imperative about how we instruct kids in hitting a baseball or calling a strike. A baseball can be distinguished from the environment around it well enough.
Noe's being myopic and tendentious in identifying "the environment" as what's left out and needs bringing in, if we're to make sense of what the neurons in our brains are doing. My neural activity and my consciousness aren't products only of the moment but also of the past--of neural architectures that arise in utero, through childhood and pubescence, and according to a plan we are unlikely to appreciate without considering our evolutionary ancestry. He's left out ontology and phylogeny, in other words, the better to direct our attention to others and the world around us here in now. But subjective experience is not all about here and now, and the richest source of explanatory evidence may indeed be in our heads.
Anyway, what Noe calls the holy grail experiments to "decipher the neural code," as they are conventionally conducted, absolutely hinge on a carefully timed and otherwise definedenvironmental stimulus, the neural correlates of which they might never even know where to find otherwise, let alone "decode." Practically everything neurological is implicitly environmental--involving what we've come to call "the language area" or a "visual processing region" because stroke victims with aphasia or blindness always show dark patches in their Xrays around these cranial longitudes and latitudes, as it were. Or because MRIs show brightenings always around these coordinates when the environment includes the sound of speech or something visual. Many theorists are oriented exclusively to the environment--looking to derive mathematically the most efficient way to reduce a photo of a face or a forest to bits of information--assuming that natural selection is liable to have arrived at it--and leaving to the anatomists and experimentalists the task of looking in brains for signs of it.
"involving what we've come to call 'the language area' or a 'visual processing region' FOR EXAMPLE"
I mean.
I guess I should comment, but you seem to be having a pretty good time on your own, MT.
See, that just proves my point. Thank you, helmut.
OK. One way an argument is compelling and important is when it's making a contrarian claim to received wisdom and common practices that is also well-reasoned and supported by strong evidence. Is Noe creating a strawman, however? That's what you're saying. But even in your case, if research in neurobiology, etc. runs contrary to what you yourself are saying, then the problem remains and you're basically agreeing with Noe. But if Noe is repeating something that seems obvious to most neurobiologists, and that's the basis of your claim of superfluity, then he's simply flailing at a strawman.
I don't know enough about the state of contemporary research to say otherwise. But I do know that in a wide range of different kinds of research activities, there is a tendency towards reductionism that can render its theories, axioms, principles, instruments as a mirage held up only by making various questionable assumptions. You see this a lot throughout economics. You see it when scientists enter policy discussions assuming that their field expertise equals expertise in making value judgments about policy. You see it in commonly used tools like game theory or cost-benefit analysis.
I guess that's the kind of worry I have. To say that an observation or interpretation or alternative conception or different epistemology, etc. is inaccurate or simply wrong because it does not fit the going models is to say something deeply unscientific. But that kind of assumption is at least implicitly made all the time, even in the sciences.
And that - the cautionary note at least - applies even when and how, as you put it, "holy grail experiments... absolutely hinge on a carefully timed and otherwise defined environmental stimulus, the neural correlates of which they might never even know where to find otherwise...." Everything seems to me to be packed into the problem of how we understand "environmental stimulus."
You're probably right about Noe constructing a strawman, at least in this interview. But I think it's still important to note that neurobiological and other research into the connections between mind/consciousness/experience and physical brain activity (which are obviously there - that's not the issue) may rest on a questionable representationalist epistemology.
I don't think it's a straw-man argument in the first degree. I imagine Noe has some real scholars in mind, and maybe what he's arguing against is true in some sense and in some circle. I think the problem is broad brushing, not straw men, together with poor captioning of the resulting paint job. I think it's a bad or unfair caricature of what it appears to portray. Even if it were true that most people on the hard-science side of the mind-body problem tow a benightedly reductionist line when they talk philosophy, it's not true that the scientific work is the embodiment of these ideas. So perhaps high schools ought to invite a philosopher and not a neuroscientist when they want a speech on the mind-body problem. Except if they invite Noe I'm afraid the kids would come away thinking something wrong about research on the science side of it, which belongs to it too. Finally, I guess I should concede that I don't know what questionable representationalist epistemology we're talking about, or that I would know one if I met one walking down the street. I think my point is that whatever it is, it's not so telling or important as what Noe seems to be scoring himself points for here in putting his finger on it.
Not every warrior is as articulate as Sun Tzu.
"Not every warrior is as articulate as Sun Tzu"
Translation: Neuroscientists, like warriors, might mostly sound like dumb philosophers, and yet there might be a shrewd philosophy in their work--because its Sun Tzu hasn't arisen just yet.
Also, I should mention that I think you must be right, helmut, about Noe's statements having value as a caution in some circles. Neuroscience probably looms like Gulliver among the Liliputians some times in the philosophy of mind. But in the wider society, the neuroscientific perspective is pitted against religious sensibilities that enjoy even wider and stronger allegiance, the allies of which are protected by dogmatic skepticism toward whatever scientific evidence may be brought to bear. In that context, which I had in mind, Noe's caution feels like fuel to the wrong fire.
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