The "Strange Doctrines" Undercroft

The "Consciometer"?

In Slate, David Dobbs predicts:

Science will [within the decade] possess what might be called a "consciometer"—a set of tests (probably an advanced version of a brain scan or EEG) that can measure consciousness the way kidney or lung function is now measured.

He also insinuates that religious conservatives might not like such a test because of the precision that such an instrument would bring to debates about such wide-ranging debates as abortion, stem cell research and Terri Schiavo.

For my part, I think conservatives will love the Consciometer because finally they'll be able to prove Howard Dean wrong.

The Phylogeny of Evil

In an L.A. Times op-ed, David Buss argues that for various evolutionary reasons, "we all have the capacity to become murderers."

(Via Neuroethics & Law Blog.)

What's it Like to be a Fish?

I don't rightly know, but David Chalmers links to two competing views on icthic pain, which may help you sort the matter out. Or not.

The abstract in the Rose paper does contain this puzzling conclusion:

Although it is implausible that fishes can experience pain or emotions, they display robust, nonconscious, neuroendocrine, and physiological stress responses to noxious stimuli. Thus, avoidance of potentially injurious stress responses is an important issue in considerations about the welfare of fishes. [My emphases.]

You might think that considerations about fish welfare would have been vitiated (in Rose's mind, at least) by the contention that, you know, they aren't capable of pain or emotion.

What Rose means is that physical stress response is deleterious to fish health. (See his sec. XII.) Still,  it's an odd use of the concept of "welfare." In Rose's view, fish are no more or less sentient than plants, and I can't imagine a scientist expressing concern about the "welfare" of, say,  turnips. But, well, okay.

To Forgive is Hominine

It is, at least, if this article is any indication.

(Via Neuroethics & Law Blog.)

If You Prick These "Machines," Do They Not Bleed?

In Reason, Ken Silber reviews On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and  Mind: A Brief Introduction by John Searle.

Interesting review, but Silber seems to accept some very weak arguments on the way to concluding that mechanistic claims about mind are "overstated."

Take this passage about Searle's famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment:

A man who understands no Chinese is placed in a room with a wall slot through which he receives questions written in Chinese. Following a rule book, he replies to the questions with other Chinese symbols. To an outside observer, he seems to understand Chinese. But in fact, he has no idea what the questions or answers are about.

[Searle's point is] that a computer manipulates symbols but attaches no meaning to them; it understands nothing. Searle revisits the Chinese Room in Mind: A Brief Introduction. He rebuts the common counterargument that it is the overall system—man, room, rule book—that understands Chinese. The point is the same, he contends, even if the man is in an open field and has memorized the rule book.

Yet, clearly, Searle's hypothetical man in the field is demonstrating some kind of understanding of written Chinese. Granted, it's not the standard sort of understanding a competent speaker of Chinese would have. But then that's only because Searle's man in the field hasn't been given the appropriate rule book--the book that provides instructions about what to do in the world when confronted with strings of Chinese symbols having such-and-such syntactical properties. A man who could perform the corresponding, rule-based tasks would "understand" written Chinese in the relevant way.¹

I think all of Searle's arguments against even standard AI claims (and I don't necessarily agree with the strong AI program) are like his Chinese Room argument: intuitively gripping at first, but easily turned aside with even cursory analysis.

Unfortunately, Silber gives Searle a free pass like this at every turn. The reason for such abdication becomes pretty clear toward the end of the review, when Silber says:

[These books] are thought-provoking and, no less important, anxiety-reducing. [They] serve to combat public fears and forestall a possible backlash against science and technology. Humans can be part of the natural world without being mere machines, and without being outdone by our own machines.

This pretty clearly suggests that Silber's critical judgment has been softened by your garden variety existential angst, which in turn leaves him prone to accept a more soothing ontology. Like so many others, then, Silber has let taste play too active a role in his epistemology.

Sad to say, reality isn't therapeutic, and that we are anxious or fearful about being "mere machines" won't make us machines any less. Then again, if humans are an example of the kinds of thing a machine can be, maybe there isn't anything "mere" about it.

NOTES

¹ For example, a man in a field has memorized my book of instructions. Upon reading the string of Chinese symbols that translates as "Go fly a kite and I will give you 1000 yuan," he proceeds to fly a kite for a time and then return with an outstretched hand. In what sense does he fail to "understand" the Chinese sentence?

UPDATE: Ken Silber and I continue the discussion in the comments. If you're interested, scroll down and read on...

Mr. C

Oliver Sacks pens this delightful memoir of his associations with Francis Crick, for the New York Review of Books.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Maths and Language

Interesting finding reported by the BBC:

A UK team has shown that patients who have lost the ability to understand grammar can still complete hard sums.

[R]esearchers made the discovery by studying three patients who were suffering from severe aphasia - they had lost the ability to understand, or produce, grammatically correct language.

For example, although they understood the words "lion", "hunted" and "man", they could not tell the difference between the sentences "The lion hunted the man" and "The man hunted the lion".

But when they were presented with sums like 52 minus 11 and 11 minus 52, which were structured in a similar way, they had no problem.

The researchers concluded that "mathematical reasoning can exist without language."

But I'm not sure how they get there. The sums presented seem as language-bound as the propositions about hunting. If so, all this finding shows is that we have discrete linguistic competences, not that mathematical competence survives the absence of all linguistic competence.

Intuition Vindicated?

Michael Shermer reviews Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink. The upshot is that

humans have a remarkable - and heretofore unproven - capacity for making judgments in the metaphorical blink of an eye that are often superior to those we might have made had we taken the time to assess all possible variables.

This line of research runs counter to a bias that some skeptics at least seem to hold against intuition simpliciter: many forms of intuition are at least as reliable as rational (and more time consuming) analysis.

But it also runs counter to a bias that most "spiritual" persons seem to hold in favor of intuition simpliciter: many forms of intuition (e.g., those based on race- or gender-based distinctions) are highly unreliable.

I suspect that skeptic hold-outs on intuition (such as they are) will quickly come around. As they should. There's nothing remotely mystical about this mental competence.

I also suspect that spiritual types will see this research as some sort of vindication for panintuitionism. But they shouldn't. The way we distinguish reliable from unreliable intuitions is through time consuming analysis.

The Naturalness of Mind/Body Dualism

David Bloom argues in "Natural-Born Dualists" that mind/body dualism (a thesis Bloom concedes is mistaken) is psychologically innate. Worth a read for the interesting examples from developmental psychology.

Is the Brain Like a Television?

I just saw Jeffrey Schwartz (apparently an actual psychologist at UCLA) debating "Mind and the Brain" with Michael Shermer on C-SPAN2's Book tv.

Schwartz' theory: "Mindful awareness influences the brain." Thus (he contends), dualism is vindicated.

In support of this argument Schwartz unwound the predictable string of non sequiturs, setting remarks about quantum mechanics and quantum nonlocality alongside stock intuitions about contracausal freedom and The Self, as if there were a logical connection between the two. (Shermer, on the whole not very strong in this debate, did make one sly remark on the logical gap in this line of thinking: "You have to be more explicit in Step 2"--a subtle reference to this Sidney Harris cartoon.)

The relation Schwartz contemplates between mind and brain is (he says) something like that between radio waves and a television. Call this the "Television Model," or TM (an especially felicitous acronym, since Schwartz is a Buddhist). Schwartz didn't elaborate, but I've heard this one before. The idea is that the mind is pure consciousness which interacts with the physical through the organ of the brain, which (like a television) receives the metaphysical "waves" of consciousness.

This model has a lot going for it--at least, if you've got a yen to save dualism. Some of its virtues on that score: it acknowledges the crucial role of the physical brain in realizing conscious behavior; it preserves the intuitively appealing autonomy of the self (free will!) over and above physical causation; and (perhaps best of all) it plausibly explains the physical (neural) correlates of consciousness in a way that resists reduction to physicalist identity.

Still, as a philosophical or scientific sketch, TM is a nonstarter. The main problem is that while a television receiver can modulate transmissions and interpret them in myriad ways, turning the tv off doesn’t make the radio waves disappear. (To put it in words that would appeal to Buddhists everywhere, The Source continues to Transmit.) But that's just what happens, apparently, when we "turn the tv off" in the case of the brain. Many physical events will suppress consciousness: the onset of Alzheimer's; anaesthesia; sleep (in some stages); a well-aimed blow to the head; and so forth. What these events all have in common is that they're result is at variance with what TM predicts, viz., disembodied consciousness.¹

Now maybe Schwartz has some very refined version of TM that remedies these defects. But I doubt it. If his Book tv appearance is any indication, Schwartz just doesn't trade in theoretical and philosophical refinement.

¹Note that generalized claims about disembodied consciousness (e.g., as in the case of NDEs) are irrelevant to the point I'm making, which is that TRM on its face predicts disembodied consciousness should occur under circumstances in which in fact consciousness is eclipsed. (Even if dualism were a viable hypothesis, then, TM would not be.)