The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory
TL;DR: In this article, a clutch of '-isms' characterises the approach to consciousness which David Chalmers defends: dualism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, anti-reductionism, and -probably -panpsychism.
Abstract: A clutch of '-isms' characterises the approach to consciousness which David Chalmers defends: dualism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, anti-reductionism, and -probably -panpsychism. (The author would no doubt want 'naturalism' included in the list as well, but as we shall see, Chalmers' predilection to describe his theory as 'scientific' stretches credibility.) While the book does not, as far as I can see, move consciousness research significantly forward, Chalmers succeeds admirably in clarifying the philosophical terrain around and within each of these '-isms' and in questioning the usual assumptions which suggest some of them are mutually exclusive. Because nearly all of what follows is highly critical, I want to be explicit about one thing: I do not think this is a bad book. Throughout, most discussions keep to a very high standard; it's just that they include fatal flaws.
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TL;DR: At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated, which influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior.
Abstract: At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated. These states--called core affect--influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior and are influenced by many causes internal and external, but people have no direct access to these causal connections. Core affect can therefore be experienced as free-floating (mood) or can be attributed to some cause (and thereby begin an emotional episode). These basic processes spawn a broad framework that includes perception of the core-affect-altering properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation; it accounts for prototypical emotional episodes, such as fear and anger, as core affect attributed to something plus various nonemotional processes.
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Cites background from "The conscious mind: In search of a ..."
...The biological mechanisms of core affect are beyond the scope of this article (as is what Chalmers, 1996, called the hard problem of consciousness: how neural states yield conscious states)....
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TL;DR: This framework offers a coherent scheme for explaining the neural correlates of (visual) consciousness in terms of competing cellular assemblies and outlines some general experimental approaches to the problem.
Abstract: Here we summarize our present approach to the problem of consciousness. After an introduction outlining our general strategy, we describe what is meant by the term 'framework' and set it out under ten headings. This framework offers a coherent scheme for explaining the neural correlates of (visual) consciousness in terms of competing cellular assemblies. Most of the ideas we favor have been suggested before, but their combination is original. We also outline some general experimental approaches to the problem and, finally, acknowledge some relevant aspects of the brain that have been left out of the proposed framework.
1,238 citations
Additional excerpts
...gif" NDATA ITEM> ]> General strategy The most difficult aspect of consciousness is the so-called 'hard problem' of quali...
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TL;DR: At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated, which influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior.
Abstract: At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated. These states--called core affect--influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior and are influenced by many causes internal and external, but people have no direct access to these causal connections. Core affect can therefore be experienced as free-floating (mood) or can be attributed to some cause (and thereby begin an emotional episode). These basic processes spawn a broad framework that includes perception of the core-affect-altering properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation; it accounts for prototypical emotional episodes, such as fear and anger, as core affect attributed to something plus various nonemotional processes.
4,585 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an elementary survey of the basic pattern of scientific explanation and a subsequent more rigorous analysis of the concept of law and of the logical structure of explanatory arguments are presented.
Abstract: To explain the phenomena in the world of our experience, to answer the question \"why?\" rather than only the question \"what?\", is one of the foremost objectives of all rational inquiry; and especially, scientific research in its various branches strives to go beyond a mere description of its subject matter by providing an explanation of the phenomena it investigates. While there is rather general agreement about this chief objective of science, there exists considerable difference of opinion as to the function and the essential characteristics of scientific explanation. In the present essay, an attempt will be made to shed some light on these issues by means of an elementary survey of the basic pattern of scientific explanation and a subsequent more rigorous analysis of the concept of law and of the logical structure of explanatory arguments. The elementary survey is presented in Part I of this article; Part II contains an analysis of the concept of emergence; in Part III, an attempt is made to exhibit and to clarify in a more rigorous manner some of the peculiar and perplexing logical problems to which the familiar elementary analysis of explanation gives rise. Part IV, finally, is devoted to an examination of the idea of explanatory power of a theory; an explicit definition, and, based on it, a formal theory of this concept are developed for the case of a scientific language of simple logical structure.
2,378 citations
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"The conscious mind: In search of a ..." refers background in this paper
...(Although Chalmers chooses to ignore the standard troubles with machine functionalism, they concern other authors enough that an entire class of teleofunctionalist approaches has emerged in response; see Dennett 1975, Bogen 1981, Lycan 1981 and 1987, Millikan 1984, Papineau 1987, and Sterelny 1990.)...
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...(Certainly everywhere else in the book, such as for the whole of Chapter 7, Chalmers carefully flags any use of specifically natural necessity; there is little reason to think he's had a lapse here.)...
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1,589 citations
"The conscious mind: In search of a ..." refers background in this paper
...…discussion of supervenience adds little to the existing literature and the careful exploration of a posteriori necessity takes us no farther than Kripke (1972), wading through the chapter and grasping Chalmers' own use of the terminology is essential for making sense of much of the rest of the…...
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01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: In this paper, it is shown that the standard connectives, as they occur between terms in that nested position, must be construed as operators that form cornpound singular terms from other singular terms, and not as sentence operators.
Abstract: Staying within an objectual interpretation of the quantifiers, perhaps the simplest way to make systematic sense of expressions like ' x believes that P ' and closed sentences formed therefrom is just to construe whatever occurs in :he nested positior. held by 'p', 'g', etc. as there having the function of a singular term. Accordingly, the standard connectives, as they occur between terms in that nested position, must be construed as there functioning as operators that form cornpound singular terms from other singular terms, and not as sentence operators. The compound singular terms so formed denote the appropriate compound propositions. S~lbstitutional quantification will of course underwrite a different interpretation, and there are other approaches as well. Especially appealing is the prosentential approach of Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap, "A Prosentential 'Theory of Truth," Philosophical Studies, s x v ~ r , 2 (February 1975): 73-125. But the resolution of these issues is not \ ital to the present discussion. 72 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Finally, the realization that folk psychology is a theory puts a new light on the mind-body problem. The issue becomes a matter of how the ontology of one theory (folk psychology) is, or is not, going to be related to the ontology of another theory (completed neuroscience) ; and the major philosophical positions on the mindbody problem emerge as so many different anticipations of what future research will reveal about the intertheoretic status and integrity of folk psychology. The identity theorist optimistically expects that folk psychology will be smoothly reduced by'completed neuroscience, and its ontology preserved by dint of transtheoretic identities. The dualist expects that it will prove irreducible to completed neuroscience, by dint of being a nonredundant description of an autonomous, nonphysical domain of natural phenomena. The functionalist also expects that it will prove irreducible, but on the quite different grounds that the internal economy characterized by folk psychology is not, in the last analysis, a law-governed economy of natural states, but an abstract organization of functional states, an organization instantiable in a variety of quite different material substrates. I t is therefore irreducible to the principles peculiar to any of them. Finally, the eliminative materialist is also pessimistic about the prospects for reduction, but his reason is that folk psychology is a radically inadequate account of our internal activities, too confused and too defective to win survival through intertheoretic reduction. On his view it will simply be displaced by a better theory of those activities. Which of these fates is the real destiny of folk psychology, we shall attempt to divine presently. For now, the point to keep in mind is that we shall be exploring the fate of a theory, a systematic, corrigible, speculative theory. Given that folk psychology is an empirical theory, i t is a t least an abstract possibility that its principles are radically false and that its ontology is an illusion. With the exception of eliminative materialism, however, none of the major positions takes this possibility seriously. None of them doubts the basic integrity or truth of folk psychology (hereafter, "FP"), and all of them anticipate a future in which its laws and categories are conserved. This conservatism is not without some foundation. After all, F P does enjoy a substantial amount of explanatory and predictive E:LIMINATIVE MATERIALlSM 73 success. And what better grounds than this for confidence in the integrity of its categories ? LThat better grounds indeed? Even so, the presumption in FP's favor is spurious, born of innocence and tunnel vision. A more searching examination reveals a different picture. First, we must reckon not only with FP's successes, but with its explanatory failures, and with their extent and seriousness. Second, we must consider the long-term history of FP, its growth, fertility, and current promise of future development. And third, we must consider what sorts of theories are likely to be true of the etiology of our behavior, given what else we have learned about ourselves in recent history. That is, we must evaluate F P with regard to its coherence and continuity with fertile and well-established theories in adjacent and overlapping domains-with evolutionary theory, biology, and neuroscience, for example-because active coherence with the rest of what we presume to know is perhaps the final measure of any hypothesis. A serious inventory of this sort reveals a very troubled situation, one which would evoke open skepticism in the case of any theory less familiar and dear to us. Let me sketch some relevant detail. When one centers one's attention not on what F P can explain, but on what it cannot explain or fails even to address, one discovers that there is a very great deal. As examples of central and important mental phenomena that remain largely or wholly mysterious within the framework of FP, consider the nature and dynamics of mental illness, the faculty of creative imagination, or the ground of intelligence differences between individuals. Consider our utter ignorance of the nature and psychological functions of sleep, that curious state in which a third of one's life is spent. Reflect on the common ability to catch an outfield fly ball on the run, or hit a moving car with a snowball. Consider the internal construction of a 3-D visual image from subtle differences in the 2-D array of stimulations in our respective retinas. Consider the rich variety of perceptual illusions, visual and otherwise. Or consider the miracle of memory, with its lightning capacity for relevant retrieval. On these and many other mental phenomena, F P sheds negligible light. One particularly outstanding mystery is the nature of the learning process itself, especially where i t involves large-scale conceptual change, and especially as it appears in its pre-linguistic or entirely nonlinguistic form (as in infants and animals), which is by far the most common form in nature. F P is faced with special 7 1 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY difficulties here, since its conception of learning as the manipulation and storage of propositional attitudes founders on the fact that how to formulate, manipulate, and store a rich fabric of propositional attitudes is itself something that is learned, and is only one among many acquired cognitive skills. F P would thus appear constitutionally incapable of even addressing this most basic of mysteries4 Failures on such a large scale do not (yet) show that F P is a false theory, but they do move that prospect well into the range of real possibility, and they do show decisively that F P is at best a highly superficial theory, a partial and unpenetrating gloss on a deeper and more complex reality. Having reached this opinion, we may be forgiven for exploring the possibility that F P provides a positively misleading sketch of our internal kinematics and dynamics, one whose success is owed more to selective application and forced interpretation on our part than to genuine theoretical insight on FP's part. A look a t the history of F P does little to allay such fears, once raised. The story is one of retreat, infertility, and decadence. The presumed domain of F P used to be much larger than it is now. In primitive cultures, the behavior of most of the elements of nature were understood in intentional terms. The wind could know anger, the moon jealousy, the river generosity, the sea fury, and so forth. These were not metaphors. Sacrifices were made and auguries undertaken to placate or divine the changing passions of the gods. Despite its sterility, this animistic approach to nature has dominated our history, and it is only in the last two or three thousand years that we have restricted FP's literal application to the domain of the higher animals. Even in this preferred domain, however, both the content and the success of F P have not advanced sensibly in two or three thousand years. The F P of the Greeks is essentially the F P we use today, and we are negligibly better a t explaining human behavior in its terms than was Sophocles. This is a very long period of stagnation and infertility for any theory to display, especially when faced with such an enormous backlog of anomalies and A possible response here is t o insist that the cognitive activity of animals and infants is linguaformal in its elements, structures, and processing right from birth. J. A. Fodor, in The Language of Thought (New York: Crowell 1975), has erected a positive theory of thought on the assumption that the innate forms of cognitive activity have precisely the for111 here denied. For a critique of Fodor's view, see Patricia Churchland, "Fodor on Language Learning," .Yynthese, X X X ~ I I I ,1 (hlay 1978): 149-159. ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM 75 mysteries in its own explanatory domain. Perfect theories, perhaps, have no need to evolve. But F P is profoundly imperfect. Its failure to develop its resources and extend its range of success is therefore darkly curious, and one must query the integrity of its basic categories. To use Imre Lakatos' terms, F P is a stagnant or degenerating research program, and has been for millennia. Explanatory success to date is of course not the only dimension in which a theory can display virtue or promise. A troubled or stagnant theory may merit patience and solicitude on other grounds; for example, on grounds that it is the only theory or theoretical approach that fits well with other theories about adjacent subject matters, or the only one that promises to reduce to or be explained by some established background theory whose domain encompasses the domain of the theory a t issue. In sum, it may rate credence because it holds promise of theoretical integration. How does F P rate in this dimension ? I t is just here, perhaps, that F P fares poore
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