I can recall a classroom discussion decades ago about the function of literary criticism: was it a formal evaluation of the literary text on its own merits, treating the work as a self-contained aesthetic object? Or was context required: for example, the reader's attention to the author's biography, the culture and historical reference point(s) from which the work emerged, and perhaps the work's social function? I always leaned to the latter simply because most (if not all) authors are writing to be heard about something in context. Few, if any, authors are writing solely for the sake of form.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who has written non-fiction works about Spinoza, Gödel, and now a blended work of fiction and non-fiction about Plato confronts this split in Plato at the Googleplex. She can't avoid a contextual approach: this work is substantially about the history and role of philosophy, and she is trying to communicate a message about philosophers talking across the ages to each other, even when it is impossible to get them in the same room together. Philosophy is that way, after all. But is literature really any different? Both have their origins in human imagination, and for that matter so does scientific inquiry, a point I will return to in a moment. (See July 30, 2011 post).
Not a biography, Plato at the Googleplex is biographical. It is a very clever book, organized to convince you that Plato, born 2500 years ago, is still very much alive today. The story of Plato or Socratic ideas is really just a tool in a much larger construct that Goldstein is presenting and arguing. Goldstein is disturbed --- deeply I might say --- that philosophy is being characterized as something like a historical artifact in the mental toolbox of evolving human ideas, now allegedly dominated by scientific inquiry. Previous posts in this blog have noted this: for example, John Searle's statement, "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." (See January 21, 2011 and September 27, 2009 post). This story of Plato and Socratic ideas is the device to remind us that many of the things that we argue about today at work, on television talk shows, in criminal and civil justice institutions, in educational institutions, and in public fora are the same things we have been arguing about in western civilization since the 5th Century BCE.
It is not enough to understand Plato's dialogues or Socratic ideas based on the text and words alone. It is imperative that we understand the context in which the words were uttered or written. There was the Golden Age of Greece glorified by Homer, then came the monument builders, wars and more wars, and in the middle of those wars an intellectual era that marks the beginning of modern philosophy. Philosophers and political leaders and teachers preceded Socrates and Plato, and they (Socrates and Plato) were arguing with their predecessors.
Modern science is no different. The same is true of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and others engaged in the quantum discussion of the 20th century. (See July 30, 2011 post). There is little difference between philosophical theorizing and scientific theorizing. They are starting points in the discovery of what is real. But ultimately, the test of what is real is dominated by that next part of scientific inquiry that asks, "How can we test this proposition?" When the testing begins, the philosophical inquiry does not come to an end, but it wanes. We can see this in the scientific inquiry into "moral behavior" and "cooperative behavior." (See November 21, 2012, September 17, 2012, September 12, 2012 post). At some point, real facts about human beings start to explain what philosophical inquiry and speculation began poking around at thousands of years ago and we keep digging into those facts until there is a more solid foundation and a story to tell.
Goldstein gets this, but she is not sympathetic to the view that some day science will have everything figured out. She takes offense at Lawrence Krauss' remark that the "tension between philosophy and science occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't." This book is a statement that not every philosopher feels threatened and philosophy does help solve problems. Certainly John Searle does not feel threatened (see January 21, 2011 post) and Plato at the Googleplex reveals that Goldstein does not feel threatened.
The contextual key to understanding Socrates and Plato, Goldstein argues, is the Greek sense of virtue, embodied in the word arête. Prior to Socrates, arête was an Athenian social construct that was dependent upon reputation (kleos). A reputation for excellence, a reputation for being extraordinary is what gave life "an added substance." "Live so that others will hear of you" is the choice that Achilles makes in The Iliad. Greek myth and song advanced this kleos-centric view. What brought Socrates into conflict with his Athenian community, Goldstein opines, is Socrates' assertion that arête was entirely independent of social regard, reputation. For Socrates, his moral anchor is not what others may think of him, but whether he can live with his own actions. Others cannot control my life; I must control my life. The quest for knowledge and truth and reality is personal, and it is not a social construct that is imposed upon me. And that non-kleos-centric view brought Socrates to his trial and conviction. Without this "context," we cannot understand why Socrates, the Socratic dialogues, and Plato are worth reading. This same "context" also helps us understand a Socrates of a later era, Baruch Spinoza (see March 12, 2012 and December 17, 2012 post). Goldstein wants us to understand this connection; philosophers, after all, speak to each other across the centuries.
But if Socrates is speaking to future philosophers, John Searle must be speaking back to this view of Socrates. Searle will not agree that reality is not a social construct; for Searle our reality is entirely dependent upon a social construct and, whether we like it or not, that social construct is imposed upon us. (See February 24, 2013 post). We are social animals.
I have not read Plato or about Plato in years. I would be interested in discovering how Plato addresses the social and moral emotions. We know that Plato and Socrates embrace the power of reason, not unlike Spinoza and other philosophers of the Enlightenment. But some Enlightenment philosophers understood the power of social emotions. (See November 21, 2012 post and February 27, 2011 post). The social emotions and language (and yes, intelligence (see November 16, 2013 post)) are, in my view, key to describing what makes us human, and these are the raw materials for the social construct that builds a reality in our minds. It is not merely our capacity to reason that defines our species.
Neoplatonism is a different subject, particularly as revealed in histories of the early Christian church. Goldstein only now makes me realize that the collection of memes that are represented by neoplatonism may not actually represent the philosophy or views of Plato, if we can ever really know the philosophy or views of Plato. A surprise to me, although surely not to Plato scholars, is the statement attributed to Plato in the Seventh Letter suggesting that he never put his philosophical views to writing: "This much at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries-that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject." If this was true --- and remember Plato's dialogues on their face express the views of others who participate in his dialogues --- then how can we ever know Plato's views? Plato is open to interpretation and if we can discern his views and philosophy at all, it is only in context. "When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time," writes Goldstein, "or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed then you've entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification. . . . one doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear in his focus, has some causal connections to the circumstances of his life."
Plato, she believes, was more of a materialist than the dualist that neoplatonists would suggest. Her elucidation of Plato's Myth of the Cave (The Republic) suggests Plato was not, as I have long believed from the neoplatonist understanding of Plato, entirely an adherent to the eternity of abstract Forms as a matter of transcendent reality. Phaedo suggests that Plato supports a dualist's perspective, but Timaeus, she argues, suggests otherwise. For Plato, asserts Goldstein, there was only one "form" and that was mathematics. "The Pythagorean intuition that the form for rendering reality intelligible is supplied by mathematical ratios influenced [Plato] profoundly, ultimately yielding him his conception of the Sublime Braid [truth, beauty, and goodness are all bound up with one another, sublimely], and the means to make good on Socrates' search for the kind of knowledge that is also virtue." Goldstein writes that in Plato's Timaeus, "the mathematics inscribed in the heavens' motions, generate the structure of reality." Mathematics is not a component of reality, however; it is a mental tool belonging to our representational capacity that makes information accessible to all humans and enables, as Goldstein writes, "our human reason to penetrate the cosmic reason."
There is a "form" that is much a part of our brain's mental faculty, which this blog has described in a prior post. There, quoting sociologist Paul Bloom, it is noted, "Our minds have evolved to put things into categories and to ignore or downplay what makes these things distinct. Some categories are more obvious than others: all children understand the categories chairs and tigers; only scientists are comfortable with the categories such as ungulates and quarks. What all categories share is that they capture a potential infinity of individuals under a single perspective. They lump." Bloom says, "We lump the world into categories so that we can learn." He adds, "A perfect memory, one that treats each experience as a distinct thing-in-itself, is useless. The whole point of storing the past is to make sense of the present and to plan for the future. Without categories [or concepts], everything is perfectly different from everything else, and nothing can be generalized or learned." So if we think of "categories" created by our mind to assist our memory as Forms, these Forms or categories are very real to us. But these are not Plato's Forms as we understand them from neoplatonists (and perhaps even Plato himself).
I cannot intelligibly vouch for or comment on Goldstein's perspective on Plato. First she informs us that Plato's views on anything may never be known, but she is bold enough to suggest that we can marshal a perspective on his views that gives more weight to one of his dialogues over another dialogue. Plato's breadth of philosophical conversation is astonishing for its day, and that fact alone explains why the philosophic tradition celebrates Plato. He was among the earliest rationalists, reasoning his way to a framework that helps us understand reality. Another philosophic tradition explores whether our knowledge of what is real is subjective, personal, or objective, universal. And there are other philosophic categories --- ethics, aesthetics, for example --- explored by Plato that are also divided by the subjective/objective distinction. Science may or may not solve this division, and that uncertainty opens the door for Goldstein to question Krauss' judgment and argue the continuing vitality of philosophy as the bridge between our senses, intuition, and scientific knowledge.
Showing posts with label John Searle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Searle. Show all posts
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Jose Saramago, Small Memories (2009)
Memory is fragile. (See September 20, 2011 post). Jose Saramago's honest account of his memories of some events in his life when he was small in Small Memories concedes as much. "Sometimes I wonder," he writes, "if certain memories are really mine or if they're just someone else's memories of episodes in which I was merely an unwitting actor and which I found out about later when they were told to me by others who had been there, unless, of course, they, too, had only heard the story from someone else." He refers to memory's "reconstructive powers," and the capacity for memory to be refreshed: "Thanks to some documents I had assumed lost, bet which providentially turned up when I was searching for something else entirely, my disoriented memory has finally been able to fit together various disparate pieces of the puzzle and replace what was uncertain and doubtful with what was right and true."
"We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightst stimulus, and there's no explanation for that' we don't summon them up, they are simply there. And it is for those memories that tell me that although, at the time, I was basing myself more on intuition than, of course, on any real knowledge of these facts. . ."
This is not the first time that a post in this blog has connected Saramago's work with the subject of memory. In The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post), the Nobelist created a memory bank in blog form. In the posting on his final novel, Cain (December 20, 2011 post) I remarked, "I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity." And Saramago is a master at clutching collective memory --- history we call it --- and creating stories --- fiction we call it --- as in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reiss (June 28, 2011 post) and Baltasar and Blimunda (January 1, 2013 post).
A series of postings in September 2010 revolved around the subject of memory (September 9, 2010 post) but more recently a posting observed: "Personal identity is a matter of autobiographical memory. This is our autobiographical self (see April 8, 2011 post). But our autobiographical memories are shared, and this facilitates social bonding and the building of relationships. It also influences our story-telling and the stories we tell each other, whether represented as fact or fiction. Cultures are built on the sharing of autobiographical memory, yet at the same time personal identity is strongly influenced by the culture that one personally experiences. While at the outset I said that personal identity owes its existence to cultural or group identity, the reverse is true as well. Cultural identity ultimately owes its existence to the sharing of many personal identities. Autobiographical memories are merged and revised into a collective memory. But as we have seen in prior posts, memory is fluid, constantly changing and redeveloping in incremental ways. (See November 6, 2011 post)."
It is collective or shared memory that I believe is one subject that is missing from John Searle's accounting of the creation of a social world (see February 24, 2013 post). Memory, observes Searle, is important for intentionality, and therefore collective memory should be just as important for collective intentionality. That evokes the importance of culture in the creation of the human social world. That is not lost on Saramago.
"We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightst stimulus, and there's no explanation for that' we don't summon them up, they are simply there. And it is for those memories that tell me that although, at the time, I was basing myself more on intuition than, of course, on any real knowledge of these facts. . ."
This is not the first time that a post in this blog has connected Saramago's work with the subject of memory. In The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post), the Nobelist created a memory bank in blog form. In the posting on his final novel, Cain (December 20, 2011 post) I remarked, "I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity." And Saramago is a master at clutching collective memory --- history we call it --- and creating stories --- fiction we call it --- as in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reiss (June 28, 2011 post) and Baltasar and Blimunda (January 1, 2013 post).
A series of postings in September 2010 revolved around the subject of memory (September 9, 2010 post) but more recently a posting observed: "Personal identity is a matter of autobiographical memory. This is our autobiographical self (see April 8, 2011 post). But our autobiographical memories are shared, and this facilitates social bonding and the building of relationships. It also influences our story-telling and the stories we tell each other, whether represented as fact or fiction. Cultures are built on the sharing of autobiographical memory, yet at the same time personal identity is strongly influenced by the culture that one personally experiences. While at the outset I said that personal identity owes its existence to cultural or group identity, the reverse is true as well. Cultural identity ultimately owes its existence to the sharing of many personal identities. Autobiographical memories are merged and revised into a collective memory. But as we have seen in prior posts, memory is fluid, constantly changing and redeveloping in incremental ways. (See November 6, 2011 post)."
It is collective or shared memory that I believe is one subject that is missing from John Searle's accounting of the creation of a social world (see February 24, 2013 post). Memory, observes Searle, is important for intentionality, and therefore collective memory should be just as important for collective intentionality. That evokes the importance of culture in the creation of the human social world. That is not lost on Saramago.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
John Searle, Making The Social World (2010)
The substance of John Searle's most recent book, Making the Social World, is largely covered by the last chapter of his 2008 selection of essays, Philosophy in a New Century entitled "Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles" (see January 21, 2011 post). I refer the reader back to this earlier post for Searle's discussion of status functions, deontic powers, and desire-independent reasons for action. This is a discussion of the language-enabled creation of obligations, permissions, rights, responsibilities, duties, obligations and the like (what Searle calls deontic powers) that Searle tells us are the glue of the human social world and collective action. I wish to cover two topics in this posting: first, the importance of language in making a social world, and second, the significance of human imagination in Searle's model of the social world.
Language is the foundation of all social institutions, says Searle. "We will not understand an essential feature of language if we do not see that it necessarily involves social commitments, and that the necessity of these social commitments derives from the social character of the communication situation, the conventional character of the devices, used, and the intentionality of speaker meaning. It is this feature that enables language to form the foundation of human society in general." Language, adds Searle, introduces deontology into social relations and how it creates an institutional reality with a deontic power. The foundation of Searle's thesis is this: "If a speaker intentionally conveys information to a hearer using socially accepted conventions for the purpose of producing belief in the hearer about a state of affairs in the world, then the speaker is committed to the truth of his utterance." There is no way, Searle comments, that if I say to someone publicly, intentionally, explicitly, "There is an animal coming toward us," without being committed to the truth of the propositional content that there is an animal coming toward us. Both the belief and the statement involve commitments, but the commitment of the statement is much stronger, for if the commitment of the privately held belief turns out to be false, I am free to revise it. In the case of the statement, however, I am committed to not only to revision in the case of falsehood, but I am also committed to providing reasons for the original statement, I am committed to sincerity in making it, and I am publicly responsible if it turns out to be false. A speech act is more than just an expression of belief; a speech act is a public performance.
To appreciate the significance that Searle attaches to language in humans, it is important to understand what Searle believes language added to our prelinguistic capabilities and therefore ask: what are the features that prelinguistic human mentality and language have in common (and therefore what did language contribute over and above our prelinguistic mentality)? The common features, according to Searle, are these:
While denying that he is engaging in speculative evolutionary biology, Searle asks us to imagine hominids with the full range of prelinguistic capabilities just noted, but not having language. Evolutionary biology has, in fact, established that this scenario likely existed more than 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. (See January 31, 2013 post) depending on when we determine that language emerged in humans. What we are capable of achieving with language, says Searle, that we cannot achieve with our prelinguistic consciousness is the ability to manipulate the syntactical elements. Language consists of sentences composed of syntactical elements that can be manipulated; prelinguistic intentional states are not: "the dog might think that someone is approaching the door but the dog cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone." [This may or may not be true for a dog, but I am skeptical that it is necessarily true for the prelinguistic human --- to be discussed below when I touch on imagination.] Importantly, speech acts come in five categories: (i) assertives (representing how things are); (ii) directives (orders, commands); (iii) commissives (promises, pledges); (iv) expressives (apologies, thanks); and (v) declarations. The first four speech acts have their analogs in intentional states (corresponding to beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions such as fear, hope and the like) and are not causally self-referential. Declarations are different. In the case of a declaration, "we make something the fact by declaring it to be the case." Declarations, on the other hand, have no prelinguistic analog and they are causally self-referential: the prelinguistic intentional states "cannot create facts in the world by representing those facts as already existing. This remarkable feat requires language." This has enormous significance for the construction of a social reality (derived from perception, intentional action, and/or memory). But through a declaration we have the ability to declare things to be the case that were not necessarily the case prior to the declaration: that I am the shaman of this tribe, I am the leader of this tribe, these five persons comprise our governing council, this piece of paper shall be legal tender for all debts and obligations public or private. Equally, if not more important for Searle, language creates speaker meaning for those prelinguistic intentional states, and, as noted in the opening paragraph of this post, with respect to those causally self-referential intentional states, language necessarily involves social commitments by declaring what we perceive, intend, or recall to the be the case. And so once we have language, we have a deontology --- the ability to establish duties, obligations, rights and the like that are desire-independent. With collective acceptance of these duties, obligations, rights and the like, we can have collective intentionality.
Not everyone concurs with Professor Searle's view on the importance of language. Frank Hindriks, for example, surmises that collective acceptance and collective intentionality can arise through gesture (including sanctions):
As a matter of anthropology and evolutionary biology, Hindriks may be closer to the mark as Chris Boehm's Moral Origins indicates. (See November 21, 2012 post). Searle admits that cooperation among hominids is a characteristic of pre-linguistic humans. But Boehm's thesis is that forms of human organization (egalitarian in nature) emerged as early as 150,000 to 200,000 years ago (if not earlier in other homo species), primarily through sanctioning behavior (subtle or lethal), well before language emerged 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. It may very well be true that the kind of social institutions created by humans for the first time 10,000-35,000 years ago could not have occurred without language, but if Hindriks is correct, as some evidence suggests, then it means that humans were capable of non-linguistic declarations and that "hearer meaning" and collective acceptance in the pre-linguistic world was secured through a punch in the face. And perhaps by virtue of mirror neurons. (See October 25, 2011 and September 18, 2009 posts).
This brings me to the more disappointing accounting in Searle's account of the creation of a social reality, although admittedly he does not ignore the subject. Professor Searle is certainly correct when he says that what typically gets communicated in speech acts are intentional states representing the world. A previous post noted the research that truth telling is the default position of the human brain (see February 4, 2012 post) and this seems to make common sense as well. But the human capacity to engage in both deception and self-deception cannot be overlooked. (See February 4, 2012 and June 12, 2011 and May 22, 2011 posts). This is missing from Searle's analysis, although he expressly acknowledges that the "one faculty that is left out of [his listing of intentional states], because it does not have a direction of fit, is imagination. . . unlike belief, which has the downward direction of fit, or desire, which has the upward direction of fit, my imagining something commits me neither to believing that what I imagine is the case, nor to the wanting it to be the case. Sometimes one fantasizes what one would like to occur, but it is not an essential feature of fantasy or imagination that they are forms of desire. One can fantasize what one fears or hates, as well as what one believes might happen, and indeed what one believes could not possibly happen. There is no responsibility for fitting with imagination. Another feature peculiar to imaging is that it is, or can be, free voluntary action. . . Imagination will have a role in our account of social ontology, because the creation of a reality that exists only because we think it exists requires a certain level of imagination." The mistake here, it seems to me, is a virtual assumption that the truth-telling default position of the human brain is the only position. We know that is not the case. We lie and deceive more frequently than we care to admit, and, importantly for this discussion, we do occasionally engage in acts of deception and make our imagination fit the world by declaring it to be the case even though that is inconsistent with the objective facts. The Catholic Church's denial of the Copernican System is an obvious example. (See December 17, 2012 and December 5, 2012 post).
This is why, in discussing Searle's example of the dog who "cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone" I questioned whether this was necessarily true for prelinguistic humans. If a prelinguistic human believed that the earth circles the sun, it is equally possible that the prelinguistic human could have held the false thought that the sun circles the earth. There is no apparent reason why prelinguistic human mental states are not capable of manipulation on account of imagination. Human social reality can be constructed on the basis of false beliefs and by declaring that to be the case, and Searle admits that this can be the case as when "a community believes that someone has divine powers," where the belief goes beyond the fact. He admits that "a whole system of status functions may be based on false beliefs," but he says that from the perspective of institutional analysis, it does not matter whether the beliefs are true or false; it only matters whether the people do in fact collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions. OK. So we create a "social" reality that is not made of the same the brute physical facts made of "mindless, meaningless, physical particles." I can accept that, but it seems to contradict the purpose of this book which is "not to allow ourselves to postulate two worlds or three worlds or anything of the sort. Our task is to give an account of how we live in exactly one world, and how all these different phenomena, from quarks and gravitational attraction to cocktail parties and governments are part of that one world."
Language is the foundation of all social institutions, says Searle. "We will not understand an essential feature of language if we do not see that it necessarily involves social commitments, and that the necessity of these social commitments derives from the social character of the communication situation, the conventional character of the devices, used, and the intentionality of speaker meaning. It is this feature that enables language to form the foundation of human society in general." Language, adds Searle, introduces deontology into social relations and how it creates an institutional reality with a deontic power. The foundation of Searle's thesis is this: "If a speaker intentionally conveys information to a hearer using socially accepted conventions for the purpose of producing belief in the hearer about a state of affairs in the world, then the speaker is committed to the truth of his utterance." There is no way, Searle comments, that if I say to someone publicly, intentionally, explicitly, "There is an animal coming toward us," without being committed to the truth of the propositional content that there is an animal coming toward us. Both the belief and the statement involve commitments, but the commitment of the statement is much stronger, for if the commitment of the privately held belief turns out to be false, I am free to revise it. In the case of the statement, however, I am committed to not only to revision in the case of falsehood, but I am also committed to providing reasons for the original statement, I am committed to sincerity in making it, and I am publicly responsible if it turns out to be false. A speech act is more than just an expression of belief; a speech act is a public performance.
To appreciate the significance that Searle attaches to language in humans, it is important to understand what Searle believes language added to our prelinguistic capabilities and therefore ask: what are the features that prelinguistic human mentality and language have in common (and therefore what did language contribute over and above our prelinguistic mentality)? The common features, according to Searle, are these:
- Perception. These are our sensory capabilities. Perception and the object perceived are causally self-referential, says Searle: we experience an object only if the presence of the object caused our sensory experience of the object.
- Beliefs, desires, intending, and emotions such as hopes, fears and the like. These are the capabilities of the mind by which it is directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world. This is referred to as intentionality (a concept not limited to "intending"). Beliefs, etc. are not causally self-referential.
- Intentional action. This capacity is embraces a causal sequence (intention and action are causally self-referential), assuming that action actually occurs. There can be a prior intent to act; it can be an intention that is coincident to acting. All actions require intentions-in-acting, but not all actions require prior intent.
- (At least) short-term memory. Like intentional action, memory is causally self-referential: we recall something only if we experienced the thing that triggers our present memory of that thing.
While denying that he is engaging in speculative evolutionary biology, Searle asks us to imagine hominids with the full range of prelinguistic capabilities just noted, but not having language. Evolutionary biology has, in fact, established that this scenario likely existed more than 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. (See January 31, 2013 post) depending on when we determine that language emerged in humans. What we are capable of achieving with language, says Searle, that we cannot achieve with our prelinguistic consciousness is the ability to manipulate the syntactical elements. Language consists of sentences composed of syntactical elements that can be manipulated; prelinguistic intentional states are not: "the dog might think that someone is approaching the door but the dog cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone." [This may or may not be true for a dog, but I am skeptical that it is necessarily true for the prelinguistic human --- to be discussed below when I touch on imagination.] Importantly, speech acts come in five categories: (i) assertives (representing how things are); (ii) directives (orders, commands); (iii) commissives (promises, pledges); (iv) expressives (apologies, thanks); and (v) declarations. The first four speech acts have their analogs in intentional states (corresponding to beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions such as fear, hope and the like) and are not causally self-referential. Declarations are different. In the case of a declaration, "we make something the fact by declaring it to be the case." Declarations, on the other hand, have no prelinguistic analog and they are causally self-referential: the prelinguistic intentional states "cannot create facts in the world by representing those facts as already existing. This remarkable feat requires language." This has enormous significance for the construction of a social reality (derived from perception, intentional action, and/or memory). But through a declaration we have the ability to declare things to be the case that were not necessarily the case prior to the declaration: that I am the shaman of this tribe, I am the leader of this tribe, these five persons comprise our governing council, this piece of paper shall be legal tender for all debts and obligations public or private. Equally, if not more important for Searle, language creates speaker meaning for those prelinguistic intentional states, and, as noted in the opening paragraph of this post, with respect to those causally self-referential intentional states, language necessarily involves social commitments by declaring what we perceive, intend, or recall to the be the case. And so once we have language, we have a deontology --- the ability to establish duties, obligations, rights and the like that are desire-independent. With collective acceptance of these duties, obligations, rights and the like, we can have collective intentionality.
Not everyone concurs with Professor Searle's view on the importance of language. Frank Hindriks, for example, surmises that collective acceptance and collective intentionality can arise through gesture (including sanctions):
"Consider Searle’s example of a wall that decays and turns from a physical structure into an institutional boundary (94--‐96). It is not obvious that any linguistic communication is required in the process. People can observe each other’s behavior including sanctioning behavior such as frowning when someone crosses the boundary. At some point it is true that the stones that are left form a boundary, and this fact involves the obligation not to cross it. The stones form a boundary because the relevant people recognize it as such. These people believe that it is a boundary, and recognize the deontic powers that come with being a boundary. In light of this, it seems fair to say that the collective intentional states that are involved in the constitution of the boundary have the double direction of fit. Language needs not enter, neither to account for the double direction of fit [causal self-reference] nor to explain the normative nature of this institutional fact. I am not sure what Searle has in mind when he mentions conventionally encoded commitments, but see no reason to believe that I have left anything out of the picture that essentially involves linguistic conventions. So it seems that Searle overestimates the role language plays in institutions when he claims language is constitutive of institutions."
As a matter of anthropology and evolutionary biology, Hindriks may be closer to the mark as Chris Boehm's Moral Origins indicates. (See November 21, 2012 post). Searle admits that cooperation among hominids is a characteristic of pre-linguistic humans. But Boehm's thesis is that forms of human organization (egalitarian in nature) emerged as early as 150,000 to 200,000 years ago (if not earlier in other homo species), primarily through sanctioning behavior (subtle or lethal), well before language emerged 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. It may very well be true that the kind of social institutions created by humans for the first time 10,000-35,000 years ago could not have occurred without language, but if Hindriks is correct, as some evidence suggests, then it means that humans were capable of non-linguistic declarations and that "hearer meaning" and collective acceptance in the pre-linguistic world was secured through a punch in the face. And perhaps by virtue of mirror neurons. (See October 25, 2011 and September 18, 2009 posts).
This brings me to the more disappointing accounting in Searle's account of the creation of a social reality, although admittedly he does not ignore the subject. Professor Searle is certainly correct when he says that what typically gets communicated in speech acts are intentional states representing the world. A previous post noted the research that truth telling is the default position of the human brain (see February 4, 2012 post) and this seems to make common sense as well. But the human capacity to engage in both deception and self-deception cannot be overlooked. (See February 4, 2012 and June 12, 2011 and May 22, 2011 posts). This is missing from Searle's analysis, although he expressly acknowledges that the "one faculty that is left out of [his listing of intentional states], because it does not have a direction of fit, is imagination. . . unlike belief, which has the downward direction of fit, or desire, which has the upward direction of fit, my imagining something commits me neither to believing that what I imagine is the case, nor to the wanting it to be the case. Sometimes one fantasizes what one would like to occur, but it is not an essential feature of fantasy or imagination that they are forms of desire. One can fantasize what one fears or hates, as well as what one believes might happen, and indeed what one believes could not possibly happen. There is no responsibility for fitting with imagination. Another feature peculiar to imaging is that it is, or can be, free voluntary action. . . Imagination will have a role in our account of social ontology, because the creation of a reality that exists only because we think it exists requires a certain level of imagination." The mistake here, it seems to me, is a virtual assumption that the truth-telling default position of the human brain is the only position. We know that is not the case. We lie and deceive more frequently than we care to admit, and, importantly for this discussion, we do occasionally engage in acts of deception and make our imagination fit the world by declaring it to be the case even though that is inconsistent with the objective facts. The Catholic Church's denial of the Copernican System is an obvious example. (See December 17, 2012 and December 5, 2012 post).
This is why, in discussing Searle's example of the dog who "cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone" I questioned whether this was necessarily true for prelinguistic humans. If a prelinguistic human believed that the earth circles the sun, it is equally possible that the prelinguistic human could have held the false thought that the sun circles the earth. There is no apparent reason why prelinguistic human mental states are not capable of manipulation on account of imagination. Human social reality can be constructed on the basis of false beliefs and by declaring that to be the case, and Searle admits that this can be the case as when "a community believes that someone has divine powers," where the belief goes beyond the fact. He admits that "a whole system of status functions may be based on false beliefs," but he says that from the perspective of institutional analysis, it does not matter whether the beliefs are true or false; it only matters whether the people do in fact collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions. OK. So we create a "social" reality that is not made of the same the brute physical facts made of "mindless, meaningless, physical particles." I can accept that, but it seems to contradict the purpose of this book which is "not to allow ourselves to postulate two worlds or three worlds or anything of the sort. Our task is to give an account of how we live in exactly one world, and how all these different phenomena, from quarks and gravitational attraction to cocktail parties and governments are part of that one world."
Friday, April 8, 2011
Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind (2010)
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.
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.
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.
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