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Date: Thu Jun 19 2003 - 10:56:44 MDT
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The mind makes a comeback By Lou Marano
Published 6/18/2003 7:03 PM
WASHINGTON, June 18 (UPI) -- After a century of skepticism, the notion that
the mind exists independently of the brain is making a modest comeback.
Current interest in the subject was renewed when University of Arizona
philosopher David Chalmers made the argument that consciousness is a non-physical
feature of the world in his 1996 book "The Conscious Mind."
For the skeptics (sometimes called materialist reductionists) the mind is
simply a word that we apply to functioning of the human brain, and consciousness
is a brain state. Others counter that pain, for example, is not a brain state,
but rather a phenomenological property produced by brain activity and
distinct from it.
One prominent skeptic, UC Berkeley philosopher John Searle, critiqued
Chalmers' position in the New York Review of Books. (Searle's book "The Rediscovery
of Mind" appeared in 1992.)
Chalmers has rebutted Searle's energetically, both in the review and on his
Web site, and partisans have lined up on both sides.
But semantic stumbling blocks and confusing categories abound. Scholars don't
always use words to mean the same thing. For example, "mind" can be used to
mean everything from observable cognition to a synonym for the immortal soul of
Christian belief.
"Nature is not a respecter of words," said Stanley Krippner, professor of
Psychology at the Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco. Rather, human beings
slice nature up and put labels on it. "Sometimes the map represents the
territory, and sometimes the map is pretty far distant from the territory,"
Krippner told United Press International.
The separation between the mind and the brain does not exist in Eastern
thought, he said.
The scientific method is justly thought to be a Western contribution. But
Krippner thinks Eastern and "indigenous" peoples are more scientific -- in that
their views are closer to reality -- because they don't have the mind-body
split elaborated by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). As Krippner
tells it, Descartes tried to change the relationship between science and
theology as a political expedient.
"He realized that the Roman Catholic Church thought that it was in control of
all knowledge. And he could see how this was holding back science."
Krippner said Descartes, reasoning that half a loaf is better than none,
postulated the mind-body split. "Let the scientists study the body, and let the
theologians study the mind. That Cartesian split is still with us."
Krippner doesn't like to use the word mind because it leaves out emotions.
"Mind is mental; it's intellectual. And brain leaves out the endocrine system
and cardiovascular system; that's all part of human behavior and human
functioning."
Neuroscience -- the science of the nervous system -- is subdivided into
cognitive and affective branches, Krippner said. Affective neuroscience recognizes
that the whole body operates as a unit when it comes to the emotions -- not
just the brain.
"The more you look at it, you can see how constricted and ultimately useless
that term 'mind' has become," he told UPI.
What about those who use the word "mind" to mean the temporal manifestation
of the soul?
"Many people do that," Krippner replied. "I turn that on its head and say the
soul or 'mind' can survive the so-called death of the body. But how do you
know that all of the body has really died? You can be a thoroughgoing
materialist, as far as I'm concerned, and still accept the notion of survival. It just
means that our concept of the material has to be expanded a little. It has to
be tweaked. ... It all depends on what meaning you attribute to words. So much
of this discussion is semantic and conditioned by culture.
"From my point of view, the whole mind-body dichotomy is something best
relegated to the dustbin of history," he said. "We now have to think in terms of
interactive systems and field effects. A field can exert influence at a
distance, both forward and backward in time, as we are finding out from quantum
mechanics. We have to find different words to reflect what's really going on. I
think that neuroscience is helping us to do this."
Krippner's respect for non-Western epistemologies and openness to post-death
"survival" puts him at the inclusive end of the materialist consensus. But to
make things more confusing, a scholar with similar beliefs finds Cartesian
dualism indispensable.
"I happen to be a dualist," said Robert Almeder, a philosopher at Georgia
State University in Atlanta. "Minds are not reducible to brains. They are
identifiably distinct from brain states, like souls."
Almeder respectfully reviewed Chalmers' "The Conscious Mind," finding
Chalmers' critique of the materialist paradigm "very persuasive."
"A number of distinguished materialists do not believe in the existence of
minds," Almeder told UPI. "They think any and all statements about mental or
emotional life is simply an alternative way of describing some neuro-biological
state. Consciousness itself (in this view) is either a complex property of the
brain or a biological property produced by the brain."
They deride consciousness "the ghost in the machine."
According to this "canonical" materialist paradigm, consciousness ceases to
exist when the brain ceases to exist.
But Almeder said the assumptions of this paradigm are not at all obvious. For
example, the taste of coffee is not a brain state, he said. Feelings don't
seem to be brain states but are made possible by the existence of brain states.
Almeder applied Chalmers' "argument from zombies" to illustrate the
materialists' failure to explain how consciousness emerges from neural processes in the
brain. "If people were free from consciousness, and everything is explained
in terms of biochemical activity, then they would be zombies. What missing
element would have to be supplied to produce a human being?"
Almeder said Chalmers thinks we answer the wrong questions and avoid such
hard ones as: "Why is all this mental processing accompanied by an experienced
inner life?"
Understanding the brain is necessary for understanding consciousness, but is
it sufficient? Almeder asked. He used the example of someone who decides to
raise his arm.
"How can I put myself into the brain state that causes my arm to go up unless
there's something other than the brain causing the arm to go up? ... There's
a transfer of kinetic energy, but there's no discernable physical object to
explain why people do what they do."
Following the "classic dualism" of the ancient and medieval philosophers who
preceded Descartes, Almeder said the soul is called "the mind" when viewed as
a thinking substance and "the will" when viewed as a volitional activity,
neither of which is reducible to systemic biochemical states.
"The biochemical states of the system can have effects on those things --
causing you to think, wish, will, and believe. And the mental events can have
effects on your bodily states, as when you're embarrassed and you turn red. And
when the body goes to the grave, there is something essentially non-physical
that can survive the corruption and can go somewhere or other depending on your
religious aspirations."
But Almeder said that with the rise of the philosophy of science in the 18th
century and the Vienna positivists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
the only questions that could be answered legitimately were those of natural
science. Questions about other entities that might be causal agents were
excluded if they couldn't be seen, smelled, heard, tasted, or touched -- or if it
couldn't be determined how they convey energy.
Almeder thinks that there is good empirical evidence for the existence of
minds.
"If you can get good evidence for reincarnation and out-of-body experiences,
then you have evidence that human beings are quite distinct from their
bodies," he said. He believes reincarnation is a scientifically testable thesis and
is impressed by the research of Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia.
He also thinks the experiments of Karlis Osis and Donna McCormick support the
existence of voluntary out-of-body experiences.
But why does a believer in souls need a concept of "the mind"?
"That's just another way of saying there is something about a human being
that's essential to the personality that does not reduce to brain states,"
Almeder answered.
Vanderbilt psychologist David Zald was asked a similar question.
"That's definitely something that comes up," he said. "If we have a soul,
where is it? Given that our brain is what allows us to accomplish what we do as
humans, it's natural to start wondering if the mind is the seat of the soul.
It's a natural course of reasoning if not an exclusive one. It's not that the
soul would have to be equivalent to the mind. But it's natural to wonder about
that being the connecting point.
"If we take a strictly materialistic view of the world, then one is left
struggling with the question of where the soul fits in. ... Science so far does
not provide much evidence for (the soul). I'm not saying there isn't a soul, but
our scientific methods don't specifically elucidate that. These are difficult
questions."
Zald's personal view is that the mind emerges from the functioning of the
brain. "If you look at just the simple parts of the brain, you will not arrive at
a conscious mind. But when those processes are put together, the mind emerges
from it."
So the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?
"Essentially," Zald replied.
Stanley Kuczaj, Chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of
Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Miss., said we still know very little
about the relationship between the mind and the brain. But a relationship
assumes the existence of two separate entities. Is the mind the name we give to
neurological activity, or is the mind something apart from that?
"I have a hard time imagining the mind could exist independently of that
activity," he replied.
Dedre Gentner, professor of Psychology and director of the Cognitive Science
Program at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., said: "I'm not fond of
the view that the mind floats in an aura around the brain or some other such
ineffable position. But I think it's a big mistake to confuse the mind and the
brain (because) we know probably hundreds of times more about the mind than we
do about the brain at this point. Most of what we know about higher-order
cognitive functions can't yet be traced in any kind of clear way -- if at all --
in the brain."
This came as a surprise to the interviewer, who assumed that the brain -- a
physical organ -- would have been better understood than the mind, which some
people consider an abstraction. But Gentner seemed to be using "mind" to mean
evidence of thinking.
"We can do quite a bit with tracing perception," Gentner continued. "It's not
difficult to get some pretty good information about how vision works, for
example." But we are far from understanding how someone does counterfactual or
hypothetical reasoning, or checks a theory for consistency, she said.
So then is the "mind" simply a catch-all term that we use to describe brain
functioning that we don't understand?
"No," she replied, "but that's a good question given what I just said.
"We believe our refrigerators work because of the properties of molecules,
and below the molecules are the principles of quantum mechanics, and so on. But
it would be absolutely crazy to describe the way a refrigerator works in terms
of quantum mechanics because it's seven levels too low, and the right level
of explanation for a refrigerator is how the coolant behaves as it flows around
the system.
"Many, many phenomena are multi-leveled, and cognition is one of them. Lots
of processes can be described either in terms of, let's say, neural firing and
chemical paths in the brain. Or they can be described in terms of processes
like seeing if two representations are consistent, or making inferences if
there's missing information. You really need them both.
"It would be crazy to explain the operation of a Mack truck in terms of
quantum mechanics, and it would be crazy to try to explain inference in terms of
nothing but brain-level mechanisms."
Once again the interviewer was confounded and guessed that the brain works at
the level of Newtonian physics and the mind at the level of quantum
mechanics. WRONG! In fact, it's the other way around.
"The brain is the substrate," Gentner explained. "When the truck goes down
the street, we believe that way down there is some kind of atomic and subatomic
explanation. But that would not be a good way to explain something that's
several levels up, because each level has its own emergent principles. ...
"Explaining the locomotion of a truck according to quantum mechanics would be
incredibly inefficient. We'd never get the answer.
"You really can explain things very nicely at the Newtonian level," she said
-- the level of the mind.
Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International
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