Phantoms in the Brain

Metaphysical Assumptions and Theory of RCR

This chapter gives a preamble to the duo of the brain and the self. Self is the single unit of information and experience that connects sensations and emotions to consciousness. And, brain is the biological organ that is often treated as an agent and director of the body which guides the working of sensation, emotion and consciousness. When on one side the human behaviours, attitudes and emotional capacities are intricately dependent on the neural structures and mechanisms, on the other these are guided by the experiential self. There is a mutual challenge that is offered by the brain and the self, to make possible the unity, continuity and adherence of our sensory and mental experiences. Two philosophical problems that arise from the analysis of experience are the inherent subject-object divide, and the amount of the ‘other’ in ‘me’ and the amount of ‘me’ in the ‘other’. We might possess an intuitive sense of the other. But it is not easy to have a well-articulated description of oneself. It is important to examine both these senses. And for that do we need to shift the scientific focus from ‘a biological organ for consciousness’ to ‘a situated brain’?

Brain and the Self

In the interest of articulating a materialist theory of self in which self and brain are ‘correlates’ in the broad sense that they form part of a meaningful, integrated whole, I take the case of phantom limb syndrome. When considered in a philosophical light, such phenomena might seem to imply the necessity of the first-person perspective, a key insight of the phenomenological tradition, in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in particular. But it is possible to formulate a materialist response to this first-person challenge. For this response to be effective, it will have to take integrate a notion of embodiment. However, in order to not to reinvest brain or body with the mysterious character that the materialist approach has stripped from the ‘first person’, the vision of the brain here must also be an embedded vision, as Andy Clark calls it, that is, locating brain not just in an embodied context but also in the social world, in the network of symbolic relations (what I call, following Lev Vygotsky, the “social brain”). A self which is the product of the brain, a brain which is intentional and embodied, and both as correlates of a materialist theory of self: this is what I attempt to sketch out, taking as a particular case, phantom limb syndrome.

Phantom Limbs and the First-Person Perspective: An Embodied-Materialist Response

Consciousness has both natural and cultural histories. How over millennia a seemingly simple organ with similar set of brain molecules, neurotransmitters and synapses across insects, fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals led to the emergence of a superior capability called consciousness in humans is a question that has persisted for many centuries. This chapter gives a profile of brain’s neural structure and its functional organization in the background of debates that polarize brain-mind, body-mind and body-self binaries. The varied expressions of our minds and bodies necessarily involve complex brain activities. But do all life expressions, and the central mark of life, that is consciousness, owe their existence completely to neural mechanisms is a question that requires not just neurosciences, but philosophy and ethics, for discussion. This issue brings to us the central feature of consciousness, which is, its experiential primacy. But, is the experiential primacy understood by positing the ‘hard problem’ alone? In this chapter a ‘harder problem’ of consciousness is presented as responsible for the elusive explanatory gap. The ‘harder problem’ is the experiencer that gives a value of taste, smell, good, bad, happy, sad etc. to an experience.

Beginnings: Biological and Philosophical Accounts of Consciousness

There are enormous amount of examples of Computation in nature, exemplified across multiple species in biology. One crucial aim for these computations across all life forms their ability to learn and thereby increase the chance of their survival. In the current paper a formal definition of autonomous learning is proposed. From that definition we establish a Turing Machine model for learning, where rule tables can be added or deleted, but can not be modified. Sequential and parallel implementations of this model are discussed. It is found that for general purpose learning based on this model, the implementations capable of parallel execution would be evolutionarily stable. This is proposed to be of the reasons why in Nature parallelism in computation is found in abundance.

Phantoms in the Brain

Citations

Metaphysical Assumptions and Theory of RCR

Brain and the Self

Phantom Limbs and the First-Person Perspective: An Embodied-Materialist Response

Beginnings: Biological and Philosophical Accounts of Consciousness

Parallel Computation Is ESS

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