Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind is the third in a sequence of books in this blog following John Searle's Philosophy in the 21st Century (see January 21, 2011 post) and David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (see February 27, 2011 post) relating to consciousness and the mind. Searle tees up this sequence by observing that Hume's Enlightenment era view of the mind and consciousness was based on a premise that the "existence of knowledge was in question" and the main task of the philosopher "was to cope with the problem of skepticism." The era of skepticism is now over, Searle says, "because the sheer growth of certain, objective, universal knowledge." So now we fast-forward to the 21st century, where Damasio undertakes a review of that "certain, objective, universal knowledge" we now possess about the neurobiology of the brain, and empirical research that allows us to draw conclusions about how consciousness emerged, and how it is evolving. This is but one example of just how the skepticism of the 18th century Enlightenment has been overcome by the objective, universal knowledge of the 21st century.
First, that "certain, objective, universal knowledge" about the brain and consciousness is not yet complete. Damasio says that, and Searle states that this is not a problem for declaring that the era of skepticism is over --- that our current state of knowledge is capable of being corrected, revised and supplemented without undermining his conclusion (See January 21, 2011 post).
So what is it that we now know about the mind and consciousness that David Hume and his Enlightenment era contemporaries did not know on this subject? Two things: without doubt our knowledge of the brain and the neurosensory system has grown measurably; second, that Hume's introspective conclusions about the mind and consciousness (which were not necessarily his views alone) were very close to what all that cumulative, objective knowledge has revealed over 300 years.
Our current knowledge of the brain, the mind and consciousness must necessarily begin with an evolutionary understanding of the nervous system to which the animal brain is connected. Hume, as I have pointed out in a previous post (see May 24, 2010 post) probably would have appreciated this approach, although he lived a full century before Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species. Damasio devotes a chapter to the evolution of conscious and non-conscious processes beginning with unicellular organism's sensory and motor capabilities to the multicellular organism consisting of cells with specialized functions --- including neural cells --- that abandoned their "independent status" to cooperate with other types of cells "to be part of a convenient new aggregate." Damasio's discussion is not new --- Steven Rose has a more thorough discussion of the evolution of the nervous system and brains in The Future of the Brain; Nicholas Humphrey's A History of the Mind develops the evolutionary history of the sensory system -- particularly with respect to vision; and Lynch and Granger's Big Brain outline the evolution of primate brains and the auditory sensory system. Damasio's take-away, however, and one that is important to a key thesis, is that the animal nervous system evolved because the organism needed some component to manage and control the organism's survival. As more complex organisms evolved, this required more complex nervous systems and brains to regulate the organism internally as well as externally. Yet even very simple organisms --- organisms without brains --- had the ability to sense changes in their environment: changes in their internal organism environment, as well as their external environment (light, chemicals, even touch) and they could respond to those changes. As Darwin, said, "From so simple a beginning. . ." That early, regulatory "component" is the precursor to the modern human's brain stem. The brain stem is still performing most of the same types of functions in humans that it performed in reptiles millions of years ago --- receiving signals from and monitoring the internal milieu of the body and sending signals back to the body. Certain nuclei in the brain stem are responsible for wakefulness --- a key attribute of consciousness: we know this because when there is damage to specific parts of the brain stem the result is coma and the vegetative state (lack of consciousness).
What we know now, that we did not know in Hume's time, is that the nervous system operates by electro-chemical means. Neuroscience has identified several molecules in the nervous system that are related to states of reward or punishment and are associated with biological value tied to life regulation and survival. There are molecules that suppress and molecules that stimulate, "punish" and "reward," causing the body to generate certain feelings, emotions, and also causing motion to occur. Central to understanding survival mechanisms, says Damasio, is the concept of homeostasis: "In other words, life requires that the body maintain a collection of parameter ranges at all costs for literally dozens of components in its dynamic interior. All the management operations to which I alluded earlier --- procuring energy sources, incorporating and transforming energy products, and so forth --- aim at maintaining the chemical parameters of a body's interior (its internal milieu) with the magic range compatible with life. The magic range is known as homeostatic, and the process of achieving this balanced state is called homeostasis." While we have understood the biological role of homeostasis for most of the 20th century, Damasio asserts that we are only just beginning to understand its significance in terms of neurobiology, psychology, and even sociology (culture).
Damasio is not merely a commentator on this subject. He is a neuroscientist who works with patients suffering pathologies that provide clues about the functionality of certain parts of the brain. He is the author of three previous books that touch on human consciousness: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Self Comes to Mind covers much of the same ground that Damasio ploughed in his previous three works, but he builds on those works in several important ways: he supplements his previous writings with a decade of new research (much of which is his own research) following publication of Looking for Spinoza; he revises some of his previous views; and he introduces new hypotheses relative to consciousness that deserve further research in the accumulation of additional "certain, objective, universal knowledge" about the brain and consciousness.
Beyond the brain stem, the evolution of the brain shows that a part of the brain known as thalamus was constructed on top of the brain stem --- it did not replace it --- and operates integrally with the brain stem in producing consciousness. Evolution ultimately added a third component to the brains of some species --- the cerebral cortex. Damasio describes the thalamus as a way station for information that is collected from the body that ferry signals about the body and about the world, from pain and temperature to touch, hearing, and vision (but not smell). All signals bound for the cortex stop at "thalamic relay nuclei and change into tracks that take them to their destinations in varied parts of the cerebral cortex." The thalamus is understood (believed) to facilitate simultaneous and sequenced activation of separate neural sites --- bringing them together in a pattern. It coordinates cortical activities, and in that capacity it is key to the rich conscious experience some species (e.g., humans) have in being able to integrate different sensory experiences as well as memory. The cerebral cortex co-evolved with the thalamus, and acts to keep us awake and selects what we pay attention to. Equally, if not more important for human consciousness, the cerebral cortex is where memory is triggered and the autobiographical self is created.
In an appendix devoted to the architecture of the brain, Damasio fleshes out the different parts of the brain stem and the cerebral cortex and describes that certain, objective knowledge we now have about the functionality of specific parts of the brain. You can't regurgitate it all here, but the point is that our knowledge of how the brain and the mind works --- significantly developed over only the past 20 years --- while not yet complete, is quite substantial. David Hume would be impressed. Some of this knowledge has been enabled by what we learn from pathologies resulting from injury to specific parts of the brain --- informing us that feelings, memories, emotions, wakefulness remain intact or are impaired when a specific brain region is damaged. Some of this knowledge is gleaned from our ability to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) to actually observe what is going on in the brain. (See November 13, 2010 post). Consistent with what Miriam Boelyn-Fitzgerald reported in Pictures of the Mind (id.), Damasio writes, "Conscious minds result from the smoothly articulated of several, often many brain sites. The key brain structures in charge of implementing the requisite functional steps include specific sectors of the upper brain stem [particularly the nucleus tractus solitarius, the parabrachial nucleus, the periaqueductal gray, the superior colliculus, and the hypothalamus], a set of nuclei in a region known as the thalamus, and specific but widespread regions of the cerebral cortex."
What the brain is able to do --- connected as it is to the electrochemical network of the central nervous system --- is "map" sensations, both internal to the body itself, and externally received from the environment around us. "Networks of neurons eventually come to mimic the structure of parts of the body, literally mapping the body for which they work and constituting a sort of virtual surrogate for it, a neural double," says Damasio. The components of the upper brain stem mentioned above are capable of providing whole-body maps to the central nervous system. Mapping of the environment around us occurs in the cerebral cortex. The concept of "mapping" (including what Damasio refers to as "somatic marking"), is not new to neuroscience. It is the subject of Damasio's earlier work, The Feeling of What Happens, and in Self Comes to Mind, Damasio reinforces many of his prior hypotheses on this subject with more recent research.
Damasio believes that the regulation of the internal organism occurs in the upper brain stem of a given specie, which creates an "image" of a "protoself." This "protoself" is neither an objective "me" nor a subjective "I," but what he calls "primordial feelings" --- "a direct experience of one's own body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer existence." These are body events, including pain and pleasure. We cannot yet call this consciousness, but primordial feelings are essential building blocks of consciousness. Damasio describes the neural networks that manage the internal organism "dispositional networks": almost formulaic "predisposed" responses of the body to an environmental condition designed to maintain homeostasis --- i.e., when 'X' occurs inside the body, there is a response 'Z.' And for a long-time, these dispositional networks worked perfectly well, evolving themselves to become even more precise and more customized. As the brain evolved, the thalamus and the cerebral cortex evolved on top of the brain stem. The mapping networks mentioned above, Damasio argues, evolved with these additions to the brain and joined forces with the dispositional networks.
Consciousness emerges with what Damasio calls the "core self," which is about action --- specifically, about a relationship between the organism and an object. The core self emerges because the thalamus and the cerebral cortex map to create images of external objects derived from sensory perceptions, and one of those external objects can be organism itself --- this is the "self as object," a conscious recognition of "me." He refers to this as "core consciousness." Beyond core consciousness, emerging from the more complex cerebral cortex in primates, humans, and perhaps whales and dolphins, is the autobiographical self, and what Damasio calls "extended consciousness." The autobiographical self recognizes "I," and memory is a key part of the architecture of the brain that enables the autobiographical self -- the "self as knower."
Nobelist Eric Kandel's research on memory and the brain explained how memories are chemically developed through the strengthening of synaptic connections, modified through learning. Damasio introduces a new view on the "architecture of memory" that has considerable explanatory power for how memory is retrieved. Ironically, it smacks of David Hume's associationism. By Damasio's account of how the brain retains memories, larger human brains lack the storage capacity for "large files of recorded images of prior events." To solve this problem, human brains "borrowed the dispositional strategy" from early evolution that allows us to be able to retrieve those memories without, figuratively speaking, having to film and store those images. Here is how Damasio says this works. The ancient dispositional networks and the more recent, evolutionarily speaking, mapping networks in the brain are now connected. A current perception triggers the dispositional network that directs the brain to reassemble aspects of past perceptions from the part of the cerebral cortex that had been previously activated when an original perception of an object occurred and where the representation or image was mapped. This occurs in what Damasio refers to as convergence-divergence zones that record "the coincidence of activity in neurons hailing from different brain sites, neurons that had been made active by the mapping of a certain object." A part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to image space where images of all sensory types occurs and map-making occurs; a separate part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to dispositional space where the tools exist to reactivate and generate images previously experienced. The contents of dispositions, Damasio says, are always unconscious --- he says they are "encrypted" and "implicit" --- in contrast to the explicit images in the image space created by current perceptions. The "encrypted" dispositions are not themselves images, but merely implicit formulas for how to reconstruct maps in image space. Our "knowledge base" is, by this hypothesis, part of our unconscious brain, stored in code, waiting to be retrieved from what Damasio refers to as "association cortices" (and hence the analogy to Hume's associationism). The tools for language are maintained here as well.
Damasio's account of short-term and long-term memory is not Damasio's own conclusions, but his model of convergence divergence zones is. Kandel, in his autobiography In Search of Memory, describes the work of Brenda Milner and others that showed that short-term (conscious, explicit) and long-term (unconscious, implicit) memory required different anatomical systems. In the words of Kandel: "Implicit memory is not a single memory system but a collection of processes involving several different brain systems that lie deep within the cerebral cortex. For example, the association of feelings (such as fear or happiness) with events involves a structure called the amygdala. The formation of new motor (and perhaps cognitive) habits requires the striatum, while learning new motor skills or coordinated activities depends on the cerebellum. . . Implicit memory often has an automatic quality. It is recalled directly through performance, without any conscious effort or even awareness that we are drawing on memory. Although experiences change perceptual and motor abilities, those experiences are virtually inaccessible to conscious recollection." Damasio suggests that "neurons in anterior medial temporal cortices can indeed respond to unique objects [e.g., one's grandmother], in perception or recall, with high specificity suggesting that they receive convergent signals [where one neuron is influenced by many others, resulting in a convergence of input]. But the mere activation of those neurons, without retroactivation that would follow it, would not allow us to remember our grandmother or remember her. To recognize or remember our grandmother, we must reinstate a substantial part of the collection of explicit maps that, in their entirety, represent her meaning." Damasio believes that this neural experience associated with the recall of past events is not unlike the mechanism by which mirror neurons (see Sept. 18, 2009 post) are involved with feeling the movement of others.
From memory, humans and a few other species, are able to recall their own biographical experiences and this gives rise to the autobiographical self -- not the object "me," but the subjective "I" --- "memory made conscious." This is what Damasio calls extended consciousness.
One cannot leave Damasio without acknowledging his views on feelings and emotions. This is not new to Self Comes to Mind, but is at the core of his earlier books and articles. The subject of feelings and emotions is integral the discussion of the protoself and the core self. "Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions are complemented by a cognitive program that includes certain ideas and modes of cognition, but the world of emotions is largely one of actions carried out in our bodies, from facial expressions and postures to change in viscera and internal milieu. Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting. As far as the body body is concerned, feelings are images of actions rather than actions themselves; the world of feelings is one of perceptions executed in brain maps. But there is a qualification to be made here: the perceptions we call feelings of emotion contain a special ingredient that corresponds to the primordial feelings discussed earlier. Those feelings are based on the unique relations between body and brain that privileges interoception." The experience of feelings and emotions, while generated largely by brain-stem neural systems, are critical to the core self: we feel our perceptions, and "once a protagonist (me, I) is added to the process, the experience is claimed by its newly minted owner, the self." For Damasio, like Hume, our conscious, "rational" decision-making is tied feelings and emotions and the unconscious, automated aspect of our brain and body.
Recall the structure of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature: Part I (On the Understanding) articulates that our knowledge begins with an immediate perception of our memory or senses, or by an inference from some other cause, which we must ascertain either by a present impression or by another inference. When we rely on inferences, our knowledge of something is believed to be more likely because of repetitive experience that strengthens our memory of the object or experience. So far, Hume is in sync with the 21st century, although we are less skeptical today of treating sensory impressions as something distinct from reality --- today we have considerably more objective knowledge about causal relations. On the question of "personal identity" (the self), Hume states that "the identity to which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one": Hume suggests we cannot know ourselves, but only our perceptions. On this point, Damasio would say that Hume "pulverized the self to the extent of doing away with it." In Damasio's nomenclature, Hume is only willing to recognize a protoself and cannot find his way to acknowledge the core self or even the autobiographical self. This is surprising, because in Part II (Of the Passions) Hume exhibits considerable understanding and command of human emotions. In discussing pride and humility, Hume states that although they are contrary to one another, "they have the same object: This object is self, or that successions of related ideas and impressions, of which we have intimate memory and consciousness."
Hume's treatment of emotions is not radically different than Damasio's, because Hume's catalog of emotions largely fall under the label of what Damasio refers to as the "social emotions," which Damasio believes are of recent evolutionary vintage, some of which may be exclusively human. For both Hume and Damasio, emotions shape our reasoning: "rational" choice, if you will, is not independent of or from emotions and feelings. Compassion (empathy/sympathy) is one of those social emotions, and compassion, along with admiration, is critical in building a social construct in Damasio's view. And so it is with Hume, as Part III (On The Morals) states that sympathy with public interest is the source of moral approbation, and ultimately reciprocal promise-making behavior and principles of justice: "sympathy is a very powerful principle in human nature, that it has great influence on our taste of beauty, and that it produces our sentiment of morals in all the artificial virtues."
Just as Damasio acknowledges the role of mirror neurons in allowing us to understand the action of others, Hume seems to anticipate the same as well as Dacher Keltner's observations about emotions in Born to be Good (see July 16, 2010 post). Hume writes, "As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget the corresponding movements in every human creature. When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is conveyed to the effects, and is actuated with like emotion."
By the end of Self Comes to Mind, Damasio extends his to discussion of consciousness to the origins and development of culture. He returns to the concept of homeostasis (detecting imbalance in life process and correcting it within the constraints of human biology and of the physical and social environment): with an autobiographical self capable of reflection, and new forms of memory enhanced by forms of communication including gestures and language, and the invention of external memory systems (e.g., drawings on caves, tablets, books, film, computers), humans begin to invent ways to govern social behavior, including morality, justice systems, economics, science and technology. Hume ends up here as well, but with Damasio we have those objective facts and hypotheses in need of further research that Hume did not have at his fingertips. And we have the research of others such as Michael Gazzaniga (see September 27, 2009 post), Marco Iacoboni (see September 18, 2009 post), Dacher Keltner (see July 16, 2010 post), and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds that adds to the accumulated, objective knowledge, which John Searle recognized represents a critical difference between epistemology today and Enlightenment-era skepticism.
Showing posts with label the mind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the mind. Show all posts
Friday, April 8, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
John Searle, Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (2008)
For the second consecutive post, I connect with issues I first encountered nearly forty years ago in college. I took two undergraduate philosophy classes with Professor Searle in the early 1970s: ethics and logic. He was an engaging lecturer, someone you wanted to listen to. Surprisingly the assigned texts for ethics were not authored by the usual sages from Greek antiquity or the Enlightenment; instead novels by John Barth --- The Floating Opera and The End of the Road --- and Searle's own Speech Acts, which includes his argument on deriving "ought" from "is."
This compilation of selected essays assembles several articles that Searle has written since the 1990s with some updating. This is not the first time I have mentioned Professor Searle in this blog (see September 27, 2009 and August 17, 2009 post) where I mentioned his willingness to recognize that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, which seems "remarkable" coming from an esteemed member of the philosophical community, "where for millenia its leading lights have been debating and struggling with non-biological metaphysical ideas about what form reality takes and how we know reality." I mention this again because I want to focus on the title article from the selected essays, Philosophy in a New Century.
Searle's article, first published at the end of 1999, begins, "A number of important overall changes in the subject [of philosophy] have occurred in my lifetime and I want to discuss their significance and the possibilities they raise for the future [of philosophy . . . The central intellectual fact of the present era is that knowledge grows. It grows daily and cumulatively. We know more than our grandparents did; our children will know more than we do. We now have a huge accumulation of knowledge, which is certain, objective, and universal . . . This growth of knowledge is quietly producing a transformation of philosophy." There are two ways one can approach this acknowledgment: as a struggle, in the sense of Henry Adams who, in his autobiography just a century earlier, felt that the accelerating accumulation of knowledge was always just beyond his grasp, or, in the case of Searle, with a sense of optimism that mysteries are on the verge of being solved while some new mysteries will be discovered.
The "modern era of philosophy" that began with the Enlightenment was based on a premise that the "existence of knowledge was in question" and the main task of the philosopher "was to cope with the problem of skepticism." This premise, says Searle, is on the verge of becoming obsolete. At the core of philosophy in the modern era was epistemology: how do we know what we know and how do we know what is real? Can there truly be objective knowledge? The era of skepticism is over, Searle says, "because the sheer growth of certain, objective, universal knowledge." And we should not conclude otherwise, just because science has not solved every mystery, or what we know today is capable of being corrected or revised tomorrow, and new mysteries are discovered regularly. Nor should we think that knowledge is not objective just because "all knowledge of reality is, from a point of view, from a perspective."
"A very curious thing has happened in the past two or three decades -- the philosophy of mind has moved to the center of philosophy. Several other important branches of philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of action, and even the philosophy of language must be treated as dependent upon, and in some cases, even as branches of the philosophy of mind. Whereas fifty years ago [when Searle first began teaching] the philosophy of language was considered "first philosophy," now it is the philosophy of mind." John Searle moved with this trend. Nearly forty years ago, when I had the opportunity to attend his lectures, he was one of the premier teachers on the philosophy of language. In more recent years, as I came to reacquaint myself with his work, such as The Mystery of Consciousness, Mind: A Brief Introduction, and Mind Language and Society, it was clear that Searle had a new focus: the mind and the social construction of reality.
The "mind-body problem" that was an obsession of philosophers for centuries --- the relation between consciousness and the brain, is "a straight neurobiological problem," says Searle. Philosophers need to forget about Cartesian dualism "and just remind ourselves that mental phenomena are ordinary biological phenomena in the same sense as digestion and photosynthesis." Searle believes that the scientific inquiry into consciousness is not to ask 'How does the brain produce the conscious experience of red?' but 'How does the brain produce the unified, subjective conscious field.?' Recall what I quoted earlier, "[A]ll knowledge of reality, is from a point of view, from a perspective." In Searle's view, "We should think of perception, not as creating consciousness, but as modifying a preexisting conscious field." This is an important point, because it treats physically objective facts as existing reality that we present ourselves to rather than skeptically questioning whether that reality actually exists.
The philosophy of mind, Searle asserts, is now at the center of philosophy, and he believes cognitive science will be the most fruitful contributor to this branch of philosophy. "The basic subject matter of cognitive science is intentionality in all its forms." Too much time, Searle asserts, has been wasted on pursuing the thought that the brain is a digital computer and the mind is a computer program. Minds contain more than symbolic or syntactic components, they contain actual mental states with semantic content in the form of thoughts, feelings and the like, which are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain. He concludes that neuroscience is moving away from a computational approach to the brain, and this is likely to introduce new philosophical questions including a shift in our concept of memory. While I believe Searle is correct in questioning the purely computational approach to the brain, I note my comment in the August 17, 2009 post that Searle should reconsider the extent that information is physical and that information contained in energy is exchanged in a computational manner. This has to have some significance for neuronal electro-chemical activity.
The philosophy of language, a branch of philosophy to which Searle devoted a significant part of his intellectual life, is going nowhere, he concludes. Searle does believe that in the 21st century, the profession needs to develop a philosophy of society. And in a nod to Amartya Sen (see previous post dated January 11, 2011) he believes that an "expanded social philosophy would give us the tools for analyzing social institutions as they exist in real societies in ways that would enable us to make comparative judgments between different countries and larger societies without rising to the level of abstraction that we cannot make specific value judgments about specific institutional structures." This is a tall order, and I would like to know who Searle has in mind to serve as the 'impartial spectator.' Also with an implicit nod to Sen, Searle encourages ethics to steer from its obsession with epistemic objectivity, and approach ethics as a problem of "practical reason and rationality." But I will say here, as I did in the previous post, human evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive science can inform this subject as well. Finally, the philosophy of science in the 21st century needs to get in touch with the questions that physicists are trying to solve about the nature of the reality and causation.
Each of the remaining nine articles in this volume addresses these subjects in one way or another, and I want to specifically call out only one, titled Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles. In this article, Searle explains there are phenomena that are social facts (the piece of paper I have in my hand is a ten dollar bill), social objects (money), and social processes (the determination of rates of exchange). How is it, he asks, that we create a "social reality" --- of social facts, social objects, and social processes --- that exist only by virtue of collective acceptance and acknowledgement of them? Searle proposes that we need to distinguish between features of reality that are observer-independent and those that are observer-relative (dependent). Physical features such as gravity is observer-independent, for example; the United States of America is observer-dependent. The existence of an observer-relative fact depends upon the existence of a conscious agent agent for its existence. Social facts, social objects, and social processes are observer-relative. The important point that Searle wants to make is that "observer-relativity implies ontological subjectivity, but ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity." In other words, just because something is known subjectively does not deny its objective existence. This is his response to the skeptic and why he believes modern philosophy has reached the post-skeptical era. His example: the fact that Barack Obama is the current president of the United States, and the fact that a piece of paper in my hand is a $20 bill are epistemically objective facts even though observer-dependent "human attitudes" are part of their mode of existence. We should not let subjectivity or apparent dualism getting in the way of saying these facts are certain, objective, and universal.
Second, humans (and some animals), Searle asserts, have the ability to assign functions to certain objects. The assigned function is not intrinsic to its physical character, but the function exists only because of a collective assignment (e.g., the function of money as a means of exchange) --- they are observer-relative. "Function" has a normative component --- they are causes that serve a purpose. Functionality that exists as a result of a collective assignment is deemed, by Searle, to be a "status function." Human institutions --- government, marriage, religion, and the like --- are status functions. "Status functions are vehicles of power in a society." They are deontic powers because they deal with obligations, permissions, rights and responsibilities, duties, entitlements, and the like. Within society, we have a set of deontic power relations, which gives rise to reasons for action: to recognize something as an obligations, a right, duty or requirement is to recognize a reasons for action that are essential in human society. The deontic relations that evolve make possible observer-independent reasons for action. Thus, if others recognize the fact that the $20 bill in my hand belongs to me, they have desire-independent reasons for not stealing the $20 bill from me. What makes this possible, Searle believes, is language, a faculty that distinguishes humans from other animals.
Status functions, deontic powers, and desire-independent reasons for acting give rise to specific human forms of socialization. What makes this possible in humans is their ability to represent observer-relative institutional facts to be the case, and representation depends on language. So we have a language that relates to obligations, commitments, rights, duties and the like that other species do not. "All status functions and thus all human institutional reality, are created by a single type of linguistic operation, the Status Function Declaration. These create and maintain a reality in existence by representing that reality as existing." Here we see what Searle means when he says that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of the mind and how it all may become a branch of the philosophy of society.
The final note I want to make in this post is to acknowledge what I think drives Searle: "there is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy: given that we must rule out Cartesian or any other type of dualism, how do we give an account of ourselves as conscious, intentionalistic, rational, speech-act performing, ethical, free-will possessing, political and social animals in a world that consists entirely [his emphasis] of mindless, meaningless, brute physical particles?" How can there be an ethical right or wrong in a world of meaningless physical particles? How can unconscious bits of matter in the skull [the brain] create consciousness? The answer lies in the fact that neurobiological systems are the foundation of our mental life, and language that enables human to create a social reality. Many of the posts in this blog from books that come off the bookshelf touch on some aspect of Searle's questions and the answers to those questions.
I was going to turn next to some fiction, but I changed my mind. I want to explore next the work of a skeptic, David Hume, which I have had on the bookshelf for some time, and then the recent work of a neurobiologist and see if I can discern the trends of which Professor Searle writes.
This compilation of selected essays assembles several articles that Searle has written since the 1990s with some updating. This is not the first time I have mentioned Professor Searle in this blog (see September 27, 2009 and August 17, 2009 post) where I mentioned his willingness to recognize that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, which seems "remarkable" coming from an esteemed member of the philosophical community, "where for millenia its leading lights have been debating and struggling with non-biological metaphysical ideas about what form reality takes and how we know reality." I mention this again because I want to focus on the title article from the selected essays, Philosophy in a New Century.
Searle's article, first published at the end of 1999, begins, "A number of important overall changes in the subject [of philosophy] have occurred in my lifetime and I want to discuss their significance and the possibilities they raise for the future [of philosophy . . . The central intellectual fact of the present era is that knowledge grows. It grows daily and cumulatively. We know more than our grandparents did; our children will know more than we do. We now have a huge accumulation of knowledge, which is certain, objective, and universal . . . This growth of knowledge is quietly producing a transformation of philosophy." There are two ways one can approach this acknowledgment: as a struggle, in the sense of Henry Adams who, in his autobiography just a century earlier, felt that the accelerating accumulation of knowledge was always just beyond his grasp, or, in the case of Searle, with a sense of optimism that mysteries are on the verge of being solved while some new mysteries will be discovered.
The "modern era of philosophy" that began with the Enlightenment was based on a premise that the "existence of knowledge was in question" and the main task of the philosopher "was to cope with the problem of skepticism." This premise, says Searle, is on the verge of becoming obsolete. At the core of philosophy in the modern era was epistemology: how do we know what we know and how do we know what is real? Can there truly be objective knowledge? The era of skepticism is over, Searle says, "because the sheer growth of certain, objective, universal knowledge." And we should not conclude otherwise, just because science has not solved every mystery, or what we know today is capable of being corrected or revised tomorrow, and new mysteries are discovered regularly. Nor should we think that knowledge is not objective just because "all knowledge of reality is, from a point of view, from a perspective."
"A very curious thing has happened in the past two or three decades -- the philosophy of mind has moved to the center of philosophy. Several other important branches of philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of action, and even the philosophy of language must be treated as dependent upon, and in some cases, even as branches of the philosophy of mind. Whereas fifty years ago [when Searle first began teaching] the philosophy of language was considered "first philosophy," now it is the philosophy of mind." John Searle moved with this trend. Nearly forty years ago, when I had the opportunity to attend his lectures, he was one of the premier teachers on the philosophy of language. In more recent years, as I came to reacquaint myself with his work, such as The Mystery of Consciousness, Mind: A Brief Introduction, and Mind Language and Society, it was clear that Searle had a new focus: the mind and the social construction of reality.
The "mind-body problem" that was an obsession of philosophers for centuries --- the relation between consciousness and the brain, is "a straight neurobiological problem," says Searle. Philosophers need to forget about Cartesian dualism "and just remind ourselves that mental phenomena are ordinary biological phenomena in the same sense as digestion and photosynthesis." Searle believes that the scientific inquiry into consciousness is not to ask 'How does the brain produce the conscious experience of red?' but 'How does the brain produce the unified, subjective conscious field.?' Recall what I quoted earlier, "[A]ll knowledge of reality, is from a point of view, from a perspective." In Searle's view, "We should think of perception, not as creating consciousness, but as modifying a preexisting conscious field." This is an important point, because it treats physically objective facts as existing reality that we present ourselves to rather than skeptically questioning whether that reality actually exists.
The philosophy of mind, Searle asserts, is now at the center of philosophy, and he believes cognitive science will be the most fruitful contributor to this branch of philosophy. "The basic subject matter of cognitive science is intentionality in all its forms." Too much time, Searle asserts, has been wasted on pursuing the thought that the brain is a digital computer and the mind is a computer program. Minds contain more than symbolic or syntactic components, they contain actual mental states with semantic content in the form of thoughts, feelings and the like, which are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain. He concludes that neuroscience is moving away from a computational approach to the brain, and this is likely to introduce new philosophical questions including a shift in our concept of memory. While I believe Searle is correct in questioning the purely computational approach to the brain, I note my comment in the August 17, 2009 post that Searle should reconsider the extent that information is physical and that information contained in energy is exchanged in a computational manner. This has to have some significance for neuronal electro-chemical activity.
The philosophy of language, a branch of philosophy to which Searle devoted a significant part of his intellectual life, is going nowhere, he concludes. Searle does believe that in the 21st century, the profession needs to develop a philosophy of society. And in a nod to Amartya Sen (see previous post dated January 11, 2011) he believes that an "expanded social philosophy would give us the tools for analyzing social institutions as they exist in real societies in ways that would enable us to make comparative judgments between different countries and larger societies without rising to the level of abstraction that we cannot make specific value judgments about specific institutional structures." This is a tall order, and I would like to know who Searle has in mind to serve as the 'impartial spectator.' Also with an implicit nod to Sen, Searle encourages ethics to steer from its obsession with epistemic objectivity, and approach ethics as a problem of "practical reason and rationality." But I will say here, as I did in the previous post, human evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive science can inform this subject as well. Finally, the philosophy of science in the 21st century needs to get in touch with the questions that physicists are trying to solve about the nature of the reality and causation.
Each of the remaining nine articles in this volume addresses these subjects in one way or another, and I want to specifically call out only one, titled Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles. In this article, Searle explains there are phenomena that are social facts (the piece of paper I have in my hand is a ten dollar bill), social objects (money), and social processes (the determination of rates of exchange). How is it, he asks, that we create a "social reality" --- of social facts, social objects, and social processes --- that exist only by virtue of collective acceptance and acknowledgement of them? Searle proposes that we need to distinguish between features of reality that are observer-independent and those that are observer-relative (dependent). Physical features such as gravity is observer-independent, for example; the United States of America is observer-dependent. The existence of an observer-relative fact depends upon the existence of a conscious agent agent for its existence. Social facts, social objects, and social processes are observer-relative. The important point that Searle wants to make is that "observer-relativity implies ontological subjectivity, but ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity." In other words, just because something is known subjectively does not deny its objective existence. This is his response to the skeptic and why he believes modern philosophy has reached the post-skeptical era. His example: the fact that Barack Obama is the current president of the United States, and the fact that a piece of paper in my hand is a $20 bill are epistemically objective facts even though observer-dependent "human attitudes" are part of their mode of existence. We should not let subjectivity or apparent dualism getting in the way of saying these facts are certain, objective, and universal.
Second, humans (and some animals), Searle asserts, have the ability to assign functions to certain objects. The assigned function is not intrinsic to its physical character, but the function exists only because of a collective assignment (e.g., the function of money as a means of exchange) --- they are observer-relative. "Function" has a normative component --- they are causes that serve a purpose. Functionality that exists as a result of a collective assignment is deemed, by Searle, to be a "status function." Human institutions --- government, marriage, religion, and the like --- are status functions. "Status functions are vehicles of power in a society." They are deontic powers because they deal with obligations, permissions, rights and responsibilities, duties, entitlements, and the like. Within society, we have a set of deontic power relations, which gives rise to reasons for action: to recognize something as an obligations, a right, duty or requirement is to recognize a reasons for action that are essential in human society. The deontic relations that evolve make possible observer-independent reasons for action. Thus, if others recognize the fact that the $20 bill in my hand belongs to me, they have desire-independent reasons for not stealing the $20 bill from me. What makes this possible, Searle believes, is language, a faculty that distinguishes humans from other animals.
Status functions, deontic powers, and desire-independent reasons for acting give rise to specific human forms of socialization. What makes this possible in humans is their ability to represent observer-relative institutional facts to be the case, and representation depends on language. So we have a language that relates to obligations, commitments, rights, duties and the like that other species do not. "All status functions and thus all human institutional reality, are created by a single type of linguistic operation, the Status Function Declaration. These create and maintain a reality in existence by representing that reality as existing." Here we see what Searle means when he says that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of the mind and how it all may become a branch of the philosophy of society.
The final note I want to make in this post is to acknowledge what I think drives Searle: "there is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy: given that we must rule out Cartesian or any other type of dualism, how do we give an account of ourselves as conscious, intentionalistic, rational, speech-act performing, ethical, free-will possessing, political and social animals in a world that consists entirely [his emphasis] of mindless, meaningless, brute physical particles?" How can there be an ethical right or wrong in a world of meaningless physical particles? How can unconscious bits of matter in the skull [the brain] create consciousness? The answer lies in the fact that neurobiological systems are the foundation of our mental life, and language that enables human to create a social reality. Many of the posts in this blog from books that come off the bookshelf touch on some aspect of Searle's questions and the answers to those questions.
I was going to turn next to some fiction, but I changed my mind. I want to explore next the work of a skeptic, David Hume, which I have had on the bookshelf for some time, and then the recent work of a neurobiologist and see if I can discern the trends of which Professor Searle writes.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Michael Gazzaniga, Human (2008)
In the September 18th post, I concluded that a grander treatment of the subject of mirror neurons should be forthcoming someday, a volume that more completely integrates the role of mirror neurons with the biological operations of the mind and body and discusses consciousness memory, and evolution. I did not expect that such a book was already on The Bookshelf and was the next book to come off the shelf. Human, by U.C. Santa Barbara neuroscientist and psychology professor, Michael Gazzaniga , is such a book. While not specifically about mirror neurons, this larger look at the landscape of language, memory, emotion, perception, primate evolution and behavior, infant behavior and development of the human brain gives due recognition to discovery and role of mirror neurons.
In the Mystery of Consciousness, University of California philosophy professor, John Searle, writes, "The mystery of consciousness will gradually be removed when we solve the biological problem of consciousness." That's a remarkable statement from the philosophical community, where for millenia its leading lights have been debating and struggling with non-biological metaphysical ideas about what form reality takes and how we know reality. For Searle, who rejects the mind-body dualism of Descartes, "The 'problem of consciousness' is the problem of explaining exactly how the neurobiological processes in the brain cause our subjective states of awareness or sentience. . . the problem of consciousness is a scientific research project like any other." And that is a task that Gazzaniga embarks upon in Human.
While Searle appears ready to jettison philosophy of the mind for the biology of the mind, it is my belief that understanding the human mind is primarily biology and chemistry and physics (neuronal activity after all is electro-chemical), but it is also empirical anthropology, paleontology, research about other species, sociology, and psychology too. The human brain is the most important feature that distinguishes humans from other species. Gazzaniga would agree, and Human is engaging on all disciplines. There is a growing body of research that recognizes this interdisciplinary approach including Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained , Paul Bloom's Descartes' Baby , Steven Rose's The Future of the Brain , and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds. Each of these books explores one or more of the aspects of Gazzaniga's inquiry: what is unique about being human? which explores the answer inside the human mind.
Philosopher Searle and neuroscientist Antonio Damassio reject Cartesian dualism, but neuroscientist Gazzaniga says: we all act like dualists. "We are animate objects, which are the subject to the physical laws of animate objects, but we also have nonperceptual psychological properties not subject to physical laws." It is the latter that is one of the unique of attributes of being human: "we are the only animals that reason about unobservable forces ... we alone ... try to explain an effect as having been caused by something." That we may "act like" there is an unseen world separate from the physical world does not axiomatically lead to the conclusion that there is a dual world of the mental forms separate from a physical world of the senses. Pascal Boyer has provided one cogent explanation why the human mind is uniquely willing to recognize unseen agents, but he does not conclude that our psychological properties are not subject to physical laws. In the end, Gazzaniga does not appear to disagree. Gazzaniga is well-known for his split-brain research of patients suffering from severe epilepsy and the only treatment is to sever the corpus collosum that connects the right side of the brain from the left side. The right side of the brain is not a problem solver; it is good at perceiving, attentional skills, and emotions, but it is the cognitive left side of the brain that takes all the input coming into the brain and makes sense of it. The left side of the brain, says Gazzaniga, is the "interpreter" of our conscious experience, and in the course of acting as an "interpreter" this biological organ organizes information in a way to create a self-conscious self (an image of ourselves in our mind, separate from our physical self, or as Antonio Damassio calls it, our "movie within a movie"), another unique attribute of what makes us human. But this is the outcome of biological processes, not a feature of a separate world of the mind.
Enough of dualism or not! There are important nuggets of information in Human. The human brain is unique, not merely because of its size relative to our body weight or size, but because the way it is organized into modules and its connectivity. We learn of two genes that are regulators of brain size: microencephalin and ASPM. There is evidence of accelerated evolution of microencephalin in primates, and a variant of microencephalin appeared about 37,000 years ago about the same time that corresponds with culturally modern humans. A variant of ASPM appeared in humans about 5800 years ago, which coincides with the establishment of cities, agriculture, and written language. We don't know whether these genetic developments are in fact linked with cultural development and language, but it is certainly suggestive.
At the end of the book, we meet Merlin Donald who developed what is called mimesis theory: that the ability to imitate motor action is the foundation of language, human consciousness, and human culture. Language and gesture, the subject of the August 31 post on Christine Kennealy's The First Word, requires fine motor skills, which must be flexible enough to involve a voluntary control of muscles to mimic or rehearse an action undertaken by some other animate object, observe its consequences, store it in memory, and then change what must be changed. Donald calls this a "rehearsal loop," which he says is uniquely human. This requires feedback loops in the brain --- part of the brain's connectivity --- whereby the brain's ability to perceive (the right side) is connected the brain's cognitive capacity (in the left side) to connect to the action, and in order for the brain to imitate another animate object (such as another human), the brain must be self-aware. Is it this connectivity that is tied to the genetic developments in humans thousands of years ago?
Finally, we meet Jeff Hawkins, a creator of the Palm Pilot, who has co-authored a book called On Intelligence. Hawkins rejects the idea that the human brain is "computational." The brain does not compute the answers to problems; the neocortex is a memory system, which differs from a computer. The brain uses stored memory from past experience to make predictions -- which Hawkins asserts is the primary function of the neocortex and the foundation of human intelligence. Recall from the September 18 post on Marco Iacoboni's Mirroring People, that the part of the brain where mirror neurons are found is a part of the neocortex, which is responsible for planning and execution. The neocortex is the center or our attentive capacity, and we come to attention when we fail to accurately predict something. So it is here that motor coordination, drawing on memory, planning and execution all occur, with help from other, evolutionarily older parts of the brain tied to the senses. This is a key part of the brain responsible for attention and self-awareness, forming what Damassio characterizes as our "extended consciousness." Hawkins' model of the brain depends on feedback loops where information must flow back and forth comparing what is happening to what is predicted to happen. Information about what is happening flows in one direction; information about what memory tells you is expected to happen flows in another direction. This is not how a computer operates, which relies heavily on parallel processes, and arguably it suggests that robots will never replace us.
I said in a previous post that one of the big three areas for human inquiry is the human mind. Human delineates why this is true. Mirror neurons, fine motor skills that enable us to imitate, connectivity among modules in the brain and feedback loops, extended consciousness, language, and self-awareness are some of the important attributes of what make humans unique. To comprehend how the human mind works is really the key to understanding what makes us unique in the animal kingdom. Not all of the answers are here, but there is a lot in one book to fathom this huge question.
In the Mystery of Consciousness, University of California philosophy professor, John Searle, writes, "The mystery of consciousness will gradually be removed when we solve the biological problem of consciousness." That's a remarkable statement from the philosophical community, where for millenia its leading lights have been debating and struggling with non-biological metaphysical ideas about what form reality takes and how we know reality. For Searle, who rejects the mind-body dualism of Descartes, "The 'problem of consciousness' is the problem of explaining exactly how the neurobiological processes in the brain cause our subjective states of awareness or sentience. . . the problem of consciousness is a scientific research project like any other." And that is a task that Gazzaniga embarks upon in Human.
While Searle appears ready to jettison philosophy of the mind for the biology of the mind, it is my belief that understanding the human mind is primarily biology and chemistry and physics (neuronal activity after all is electro-chemical), but it is also empirical anthropology, paleontology, research about other species, sociology, and psychology too. The human brain is the most important feature that distinguishes humans from other species. Gazzaniga would agree, and Human is engaging on all disciplines. There is a growing body of research that recognizes this interdisciplinary approach including Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained , Paul Bloom's Descartes' Baby , Steven Rose's The Future of the Brain , and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds. Each of these books explores one or more of the aspects of Gazzaniga's inquiry: what is unique about being human? which explores the answer inside the human mind.
Philosopher Searle and neuroscientist Antonio Damassio reject Cartesian dualism, but neuroscientist Gazzaniga says: we all act like dualists. "We are animate objects, which are the subject to the physical laws of animate objects, but we also have nonperceptual psychological properties not subject to physical laws." It is the latter that is one of the unique of attributes of being human: "we are the only animals that reason about unobservable forces ... we alone ... try to explain an effect as having been caused by something." That we may "act like" there is an unseen world separate from the physical world does not axiomatically lead to the conclusion that there is a dual world of the mental forms separate from a physical world of the senses. Pascal Boyer has provided one cogent explanation why the human mind is uniquely willing to recognize unseen agents, but he does not conclude that our psychological properties are not subject to physical laws. In the end, Gazzaniga does not appear to disagree. Gazzaniga is well-known for his split-brain research of patients suffering from severe epilepsy and the only treatment is to sever the corpus collosum that connects the right side of the brain from the left side. The right side of the brain is not a problem solver; it is good at perceiving, attentional skills, and emotions, but it is the cognitive left side of the brain that takes all the input coming into the brain and makes sense of it. The left side of the brain, says Gazzaniga, is the "interpreter" of our conscious experience, and in the course of acting as an "interpreter" this biological organ organizes information in a way to create a self-conscious self (an image of ourselves in our mind, separate from our physical self, or as Antonio Damassio calls it, our "movie within a movie"), another unique attribute of what makes us human. But this is the outcome of biological processes, not a feature of a separate world of the mind.
Enough of dualism or not! There are important nuggets of information in Human. The human brain is unique, not merely because of its size relative to our body weight or size, but because the way it is organized into modules and its connectivity. We learn of two genes that are regulators of brain size: microencephalin and ASPM. There is evidence of accelerated evolution of microencephalin in primates, and a variant of microencephalin appeared about 37,000 years ago about the same time that corresponds with culturally modern humans. A variant of ASPM appeared in humans about 5800 years ago, which coincides with the establishment of cities, agriculture, and written language. We don't know whether these genetic developments are in fact linked with cultural development and language, but it is certainly suggestive.
At the end of the book, we meet Merlin Donald who developed what is called mimesis theory: that the ability to imitate motor action is the foundation of language, human consciousness, and human culture. Language and gesture, the subject of the August 31 post on Christine Kennealy's The First Word, requires fine motor skills, which must be flexible enough to involve a voluntary control of muscles to mimic or rehearse an action undertaken by some other animate object, observe its consequences, store it in memory, and then change what must be changed. Donald calls this a "rehearsal loop," which he says is uniquely human. This requires feedback loops in the brain --- part of the brain's connectivity --- whereby the brain's ability to perceive (the right side) is connected the brain's cognitive capacity (in the left side) to connect to the action, and in order for the brain to imitate another animate object (such as another human), the brain must be self-aware. Is it this connectivity that is tied to the genetic developments in humans thousands of years ago?
Finally, we meet Jeff Hawkins, a creator of the Palm Pilot, who has co-authored a book called On Intelligence. Hawkins rejects the idea that the human brain is "computational." The brain does not compute the answers to problems; the neocortex is a memory system, which differs from a computer. The brain uses stored memory from past experience to make predictions -- which Hawkins asserts is the primary function of the neocortex and the foundation of human intelligence. Recall from the September 18 post on Marco Iacoboni's Mirroring People, that the part of the brain where mirror neurons are found is a part of the neocortex, which is responsible for planning and execution. The neocortex is the center or our attentive capacity, and we come to attention when we fail to accurately predict something. So it is here that motor coordination, drawing on memory, planning and execution all occur, with help from other, evolutionarily older parts of the brain tied to the senses. This is a key part of the brain responsible for attention and self-awareness, forming what Damassio characterizes as our "extended consciousness." Hawkins' model of the brain depends on feedback loops where information must flow back and forth comparing what is happening to what is predicted to happen. Information about what is happening flows in one direction; information about what memory tells you is expected to happen flows in another direction. This is not how a computer operates, which relies heavily on parallel processes, and arguably it suggests that robots will never replace us.
I said in a previous post that one of the big three areas for human inquiry is the human mind. Human delineates why this is true. Mirror neurons, fine motor skills that enable us to imitate, connectivity among modules in the brain and feedback loops, extended consciousness, language, and self-awareness are some of the important attributes of what make humans unique. To comprehend how the human mind works is really the key to understanding what makes us unique in the animal kingdom. Not all of the answers are here, but there is a lot in one book to fathom this huge question.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Christine Kenneally, The First Word (2007)
In my worldview, there are three very big subjects for human inquiry: 1) the realm of the very large --- the universe (and whether there is more than one, making the word universe a possible oxymoron), its origin and history; 2) the realm of the very small -- the smallest molecular (sub)units, and their behavior; and 3) the human mind --- how it works, consciousness, intentionality. Some might object and cite Schrodinger's interrogatory --- What is Life? --- as a big subject for human inquiry, and I do not disagree, but I submit that if humanity can get its consensus arms around my three big subjects, the subject of "life," will fall into place in large measure. The first two subjects are critical and fundamental to understanding how physical objects and living beings were first created, died or evolved; the third subject is really about "us" --- a characteristic that is specially defining of human beings.
The first two books I discussed below surveying the "new" science of information theory actually address all three of the very big subjects in one way or another. Christine Kenneally's survey of the current research examining the evolution of human language, The First Word, fits in the third big box - the human mind; yet as you read her survey of language and speech research, one can't help but think about the communications --- computational activity --- going on everywhere in the realm of the very large and the realm of the very small documented by the Lloyd and Seife (see August 23, 2009 and August 17, 2009 posts). The constituents of the entire physical world have been computing --- communicating --- for billions of years, so it should come as no surprise that our species communicates. The form of those communications varies from constituent to constituent -- by collision among atomic particles in the realm of the very small as Lloyd documents -- but how did the human species develop a very sophisticated form of communicating that includes not just speech and written language, but speech acts such as gestures, pointing, and other animated conduct? That is the question that Christine Kenneally investigates in The First Word.
I want to suggest to her that she look to Lloyd's treatment of information theory and complexity theory --- whether we call it communicating or computational activity, there must be emergent properties that cause communications to take on additional complexity in the course of evolutionary history, including gestures, sounds, word formation, symbolic representations, and finally meaning. Kenneally does not address this particular angle, but some of the research she reviews lays the foundation for this type of discussion about human language in light of the types of communications studied in non-human species. She does cite Luc Steels for the proposition that "human language ability is an emergent adaptive system that is created by a basic cognitive mechanism rather than by a genetically endowed language module."
Is human language an adaptation that required many evolutionary events? Or is human language something that is hardwired in our species? Noam Chomsky notwithstanding, the sum of the research reviewed by Kenneally supports only the former view. Not only has the human species evolved biologically to enable our unique type of communicating, but the form of human communications, language, and the meaning of words have evolved as well. Language is a social institution, and social institutions and culture evolve, albeit at a different and faster pace than biological evolution. We seem to be approaching Richard Dawkins' treatment of the evolution of memes here. And while The First Word does not have an answer or definitive conclusion to "the search for the origins of human language," Kenneally does endorse a very Dawkins-like worldview:
"Even if researchers can't pinpoint every evolutionary event that led to the language we have today, and even though we don't know exactly what all the bends in the historical road looked like, the principles for further illuminating the path of language evolution are now self-evident. Fundamentally, the appearance of design in biology and in language can be taken as a sign of evolution, not a designer. Additionally, where complex design does exist, it makes sense not to treat the whole as a monolith that simply developed from nothing to something in one or two quick steps. Finally, the most likely scenario is that both evolutionary novelty and derivation played a significant role in the evolution of a phenomenon as complex as language."
Anyone studying the human mind must investigate speech acts as part of their inquiry, and Kenneally's survey of the recent research on the evolution language is a good place to start. But language is only a piece of the mind's puzzle. How is it that human minds can read other minds without speaking? Speaking and hearing and reading and intentional gestures are not the only forms of communicating.
The first two books I discussed below surveying the "new" science of information theory actually address all three of the very big subjects in one way or another. Christine Kenneally's survey of the current research examining the evolution of human language, The First Word, fits in the third big box - the human mind; yet as you read her survey of language and speech research, one can't help but think about the communications --- computational activity --- going on everywhere in the realm of the very large and the realm of the very small documented by the Lloyd and Seife (see August 23, 2009 and August 17, 2009 posts). The constituents of the entire physical world have been computing --- communicating --- for billions of years, so it should come as no surprise that our species communicates. The form of those communications varies from constituent to constituent -- by collision among atomic particles in the realm of the very small as Lloyd documents -- but how did the human species develop a very sophisticated form of communicating that includes not just speech and written language, but speech acts such as gestures, pointing, and other animated conduct? That is the question that Christine Kenneally investigates in The First Word.
I want to suggest to her that she look to Lloyd's treatment of information theory and complexity theory --- whether we call it communicating or computational activity, there must be emergent properties that cause communications to take on additional complexity in the course of evolutionary history, including gestures, sounds, word formation, symbolic representations, and finally meaning. Kenneally does not address this particular angle, but some of the research she reviews lays the foundation for this type of discussion about human language in light of the types of communications studied in non-human species. She does cite Luc Steels for the proposition that "human language ability is an emergent adaptive system that is created by a basic cognitive mechanism rather than by a genetically endowed language module."
Is human language an adaptation that required many evolutionary events? Or is human language something that is hardwired in our species? Noam Chomsky notwithstanding, the sum of the research reviewed by Kenneally supports only the former view. Not only has the human species evolved biologically to enable our unique type of communicating, but the form of human communications, language, and the meaning of words have evolved as well. Language is a social institution, and social institutions and culture evolve, albeit at a different and faster pace than biological evolution. We seem to be approaching Richard Dawkins' treatment of the evolution of memes here. And while The First Word does not have an answer or definitive conclusion to "the search for the origins of human language," Kenneally does endorse a very Dawkins-like worldview:
"Even if researchers can't pinpoint every evolutionary event that led to the language we have today, and even though we don't know exactly what all the bends in the historical road looked like, the principles for further illuminating the path of language evolution are now self-evident. Fundamentally, the appearance of design in biology and in language can be taken as a sign of evolution, not a designer. Additionally, where complex design does exist, it makes sense not to treat the whole as a monolith that simply developed from nothing to something in one or two quick steps. Finally, the most likely scenario is that both evolutionary novelty and derivation played a significant role in the evolution of a phenomenon as complex as language."
Anyone studying the human mind must investigate speech acts as part of their inquiry, and Kenneally's survey of the recent research on the evolution language is a good place to start. But language is only a piece of the mind's puzzle. How is it that human minds can read other minds without speaking? Speaking and hearing and reading and intentional gestures are not the only forms of communicating.
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