Critical Neuroscience #3.1 Philosophy of Mind and Neuroscience

let me tell you why I'm doing the session or at least as I understand it we're interested in the way in which neuroscience is taken institution and that depends least in part on what people think about the brain in particularly it depends on in part on what neuroscientists think about the brain and but only in part of course depends on journalists and other people too obviously but part of what neuroscientist think about the brain and its role in the mind and it's connection to the mind depends on what philosophers have thought about the mind and before there were psychologists there were philosophers and philosophers have been thinking about the nature of the mind since the beginning of philosophy now I don't know I can only I can only assert but I can't I can't prove that philosophical ideas about the mind in the brain have influenced neuro scientists i can't trace the historical development of those influences but i'm quite sure for reasons I can tell you afterwards that philosophy of the last 50 or 60 years has had an impact on the way in which the science of the mind have proceeded and so what I'm gonna try to do is tell you about the history of the philosophy of the mind for the last 50 or 60 years and try to show you what the essential commitments of the of the mainstream view are okay and that's a little beyond my brief it's not really what suparna and Yana asked me to do that's a little more than they asked me to do a little bit different what they asked me to do but the reason I'm doing it is because it seems to me that what they did asked me to do involves talking about how philosopher's some philosophers have begun to question the mainstream view at least one aspect of the mainstream view and they've questioned it in a way that's directly relevant to the critical neuroscience project so seems to me you would I thought it might be helpful for you to have some sense of what the kind of general picture is about the nature of the mine you'll see clearly how it's relevant to some of the things we've talked about this morning and and then I'll say something about how one aspect one thesis of the main street view is being questioned in philosophy or has been questioned in philosophy and I'll try to say something about why that's relevant to critical neuroscience okay so that that's the plan right okay now I'm gonna have to start way back before 50 years just because recent philosophy mind inherits some things so in the beginning of the philosophy of mind there is Descartes okay and Descartes I was just saying to young Descartes don't believe what people say to you but Descartes Descartes is now the sort of Jewish mother of the sciences of the mind right every hang-up we've got is his fault and that's not fair it's not fair and it's not accurate it is true that we've inherited the framework of thinking about the mind from him that is true and he might not like that framework in which case you might not be happy with him but to the extent that we've got a framework it's a Cartesian framework and so far no one's come up with anything better I'll search that now I won't spend a lot of time on Descartes but in a certain way des cartes ideas really are not just of historical interest this is not just the sort of philosophers wax museum I mean Descartes Cartesian views are still the core of what philosophers think about the mind and indeed what I believe most psychologist and neuroscientist think about the mind - let me just begin this is I know this will bore you but it's good for your education right this is this is like medicine so this is a very short passage from a very very famous in a way the most famous of Descartes arguments it's a fragment of the argument that Descartes gives for the separation of mind and body it's from a work called the meditations which is a very very short work and it's called the meditations because Descartes presents it in a dramatic form in the form of a bunch of evening meditate right so the first meditation is as a where he says that he's sitting down and thinking about the nature of mind and knowledge and he tells you what he thinks and and then the second meditation is the second and so on and in the course of these six meditations he he does a bunch of things what he does very famously courses he would he wants to know what we can know for sure and so he begins by doubting everything and as you know the first thing he tries to show that we know for sure is that we ourselves where the thinker exists okay it was a very famous here mark marker wanted something on the board okay okay so that's the very famous cogito I think therefore I am and I mentioned this not again not just of historical interest but it's crucial to take arts view not just that the mind exists but that what the mind is is a certain kind of thing okay and what he thinks it is is something that thinks so the fact that this argument so what Descartes says in effect is look here's what I know one thing I know for sure I know I exist because when I think there must be something that's thinking right so even if I'm wrong but everything else I can't be wrong but the fact that I'm thinking and then what he says is but look what is this what is this thing that thinks what right this thing that I supposedly know exists what is it and he discovers as a word as meditations just the mind so the first thing the first pillar of cartesian thought is that the mind is nothing more right it's essential feature is to think and I'll show you in a second why that's relevant to us so here's the very famous of part of the famous argument he says on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself and as far as I'm only a thinking and unex tended thing unex tended means it doesn't take him any space it's over Descartes what makes something of body is that it takes up space so on the one hand the mind me I am an unthinking thing and on the other hand I possess a distinct idea of body insofar as it's only an extended an unthinking thing it's certain that sorry in as far as it's only an extended unthinking thing is certain that I that is my mind by which I am what I is entirely and truly distinct from my body and may exist without it okay so this is the the the argument that sort of launched a thousand ships so the idea then is the the mind the thing that I'm sure about is the me the self right is this thing that thinks that's all it is that's what it is in essence and it's distinct from everything else in the universe insofar as it is the thinking thing whereas everything else in the universe is non thinking and extended okay and if you saw the rest of the argued see there's some technicalities about how if it one thing is essentially this and nothing is essential that they can't be the same thing okay so that's this famous argument now why is this relevant okay so they cart given that the mind is this thing that thinks it obviously is connected to the body at this stage and the meditations he's not sure he has a body yet but eventually he proves to himself that he has the body and the mind has to be connected to the body and so we've got this picture now of here's the brain and here is did this is where Descartes thought the mind and the body interact anyone know where that is it's very famous the pineal gland yeah so people like to make fun of Descartes so this is one of the easy ways of making fun of him he had a good reason for thing he was the pineal gland right deep and yes so he so the mind is up here somewhere in it and interacts with the body of the pineal gland pineal gland doesn't matter what matters is is this idea that the mind is separate from everything else there's only there's one point of entry that the mind has into the physical world it must because ultimately when I do things that my mind directs me to do it's moving my body or so it's moving something that's moving the rest of my body but it's separate from the physical world other than through this point of contact okay so I want to focus on two ideas that we've inherited from Descartes the first as I've already said is the idea that the mind is a thinking thing we'll see why that's relevant a little bit down the track and as I've just said that it's distinct from my body so already in Descartes we've got the idea got two ideas one is that the mind is a thing which interacts with the physical world through my brain but it need not interact with the physical world it can exist on its own and it's fundamentally separate different from the physical works it's not physical okay so the first Cartesian idea is that the mind is an isolated object and the second idea that we inherit from Descartes is that the thing that thinks thinking right happens in your mind and nowhere else of course the thinking eventually makes its influence felt on your body but the thinking is exclusively in that thing which is not physical and separate from your body in the rest of the universe okay said okay I mean you should say no that's not okay that's absurd right but anyhow since you're okay now now let's skip to the 20th century the contemporary philosophy of mind modern philosophy of mind starts in the 50s like so many other things that we're going to be talking about there's this kind of just some sort of sea change that's happening in the 50s and philosophers anyway trace the origins of modern philosophy of mind to three figures all in place usually called known as UT place was a British psychologist who was working in Australia in adelaide herbert feigl who was an american american Floss who worked at minnesota and jthe smart jack smart who's still alive and I'm gonna make something of that in a second who was also British is also British who moved to Australia as young man and was working in Adelaide and was a colleague of Ellen places in 956 place writes this article with the title is consciousness a brain process right and it's a question right so here's this thing that psychologists are baffled about conscious experiences by way and yet as in mind as a paradigm case you know seeing a color right he didn't mean anything elaborate in the way that we now mean Minh the sense of we now mean consciousness he meant something very simple could this be a brain process and he gives us an argument about why this could be a brain process smart is influenced by this and he writes an article three years later giving a philosophical defense of this view and the defense is complicated but the gist of it boils down to a common-sense view and it's the view expressed here that every that everything should be explicitly explicable in terms of physics except the occurrence of sensation seems to me to be frankly unbelievable such sensations would be noma logical danglers there's a very famous phrase and all it means is that there would be no physical laws that could connect sensations to everything else so what he's saying in effect is this picture is incoherent right because the mind as a non-physical thing has to effect a physical thing how does it do it oh it does it by causing things in the brain but only physical things can cause other physical things to do things right so how does it happen so smart saying in effect look I don't know how it happens but that everything in the universe should be explicable in terms of a bunch of fairly simple physical laws except for this one thing namely how human beings have these contradictions that seem frankly unbelievable okay now the reason I mention this is not to give you the history because the history is a monument of interest to philosophers I get I want there's a couple reasons why I'm pointing this one is that smart is still alive right smart was a colleague of mine I worked in Australia for many years and smart retired to the department that I worked in the best colleague you can imagine in his 90s or late 80s he was still coming into the office of nine o'clock and still leaving at 5:00 and still advising students and incredible man absolutely incredible man but he's still alive right this is this is one generation ago two generations ago okay so we still have a living link to a point in history when people had to argue think hard about whether the mind was the brain or somehow reducible to the brain okay it's a very very recent idea not not in the history of lawsuit mean that ideas come and gone but in the in the modern history of thinking about the mind the idea the radical idea that the mind was just what the brain does was is only sixty years old just to show you here's a second reason well should not only is decide to your recent but it was and none was a radical it was absurd most people thought it was absurd here's a lovely passage from a history of philosophy in Australia a well-known British philosopher so AC Jackson was a very famous philosopher who went from Monash from Melbourne the department I worked in to Oxford on a sabbatical year a well-known British philosopher said hey Steve Jackson who was in England at the time what's happened to smart I hear he's going about saying that the mind is the brain you think it might be the heat and Jackson supposed to replied it's not that hot right he you know you can't explain the madness of thinking that the brain the mind is nothing more than the brain does just by appealing to the Australian Heat it's that crazy okay so at least among philosophers and philosophers had good reasons for thinking was crazy right it's not just being obtuse but among philosophers at any rate the idea the mind is identical to the brain was a radical and to some absurd idea okay so something's gone on here in the last sixty years that's changed our views and whatever else has gone on it's worth bearing in mind that we're still I think we're still at the beginning of coming to grips with this idea that we're we're now taken for granted I mean I'll tell you a little anecdote when I when I I was also like Lawrence I was an undergraduate here and I took a philosophy of mind class with someone who had a big big impression on me made a big impression on me and we read those papers that I refer to in the commentaries on them and I struggled for weeks in this class I could not make head or tail these papers and it finally dawned on me toward the end of the semester that all of these guys were assuming that the product that it was obvious that the mind and the brain were different things and they were trying to come to grips with the possibility that they weren't and I had just been assuming that of course they are right I mean this was nineteen whatever I won't tell you when it was but it was a lot later than the 50s and I didn't even occur to me that the two things that anyone could think they were separate but of course in those days most people did officially right in a room like this nobody does I mean in church yes right or you know if you're if you're in a in a Tibetan monastery sure but Kwai intellectual people scientist neuroscientist philosophers officially there's no question anymore right we're now we now all believe that the mind and the brain are identical okay I'm gonna skip ahead intellectually so is it says that all right I mean I'd like to hear more about your views in a way because as I say I think it's I'm belaboring this in part because it's now so much part of you know received wisdom that you need a critical neuroscientist to say hang on let's you know I mean it doesn't come down to us from Jesus or Moses I mean this is something that's it's not that long ago people who were alive now can remember a time when this was a radical idea okay so we've moved from this Cartesian picture to the the idea that there's only one thing the brain okay lots of stuff happened in order to make this prominent but anyhow let's suppose by 1960 this is the standard view now there's a problem with this view not just to fill it and in fact not a philosophical problem a much more substantial problem than a philosophical problem and the problem is how on earth could something like this do what it is that minds are supposed to do right it's just a piece of meat after all how wonder if does it happen now lawrence and yon have gone through you know we heard this morning lots and lots of ideas about how this happened none of which were ever fruitful enough to generate anything like a theory fortunately at the same time as this was happening we began to get a theory lawrence mentioned sorry that's the question Lawrence mentioned Alan Turing is the the figure that he he didn't mention and this is Alan Turing as a young man Alan Turing was altering his a is a hero of mine he he had an amazing life and if you want a there's a biography of Alan Turing called the Enigma by somebody whose name I can never remember I read it's the best biography I've ever written every time I tell my students about it I can never remember his name anyhow I'll think it in a second Lawrence is gonna tell me in oh yeah thank you Alan Turing was a logician British logician who worked in Cambridge and it's there's a fascinating story about how this happened which I won't I won't tell you details I've now just take us too far afield but touring like many logicians and mathematicians of his era came into mathematics with a bunch of fundamental questions that had been set for the community by up a mathematician called David Hilbert so Hilbert around the turn of the century said look there's a bunch of big problems in mathematics big unsolved problems these are the problems that you young generations should focus on and one of the problems was could there be an out well not algorithm or could it be a recipe could we write down a recipe a mechanical recipe mechanical procedure something that didn't require thinking that would allow us to prove mathematical theorems that were true but we're provable okay or is it the case that you have to do what graduate students still do right when they're in math you had a friend in grad school who's a mathematician I said so what is it to do research in mathematics anyhow right and he said well you sit down and you write theorem at the top of the page and you write down the theorem that you're interested in and then you sit there and that's how research goes and you wait to have an idea right and so Hilbert of course what Hilbert wants to know was is there some way to do it that doesn't require this flash of creativity so he surely was interesting that question and he wrote a paper in 1936 that addressed that question and in order to address the question he said look what is hilde what what what might we mean by mechanical procedure what does that mean and so he devised a little a little machine that had various properties that seemed to him to constitute a mechanical procedure and then he went on to prove that have that you mean by mechanical procedure then the answered Hilbert's question is no there is no universally valid way of proving theorems that are true now that machine is the modern computer the case so one of the interesting things to me is particularly when you hear you know our Prime Minister for example talked about the relevance of Applied Research you know how important it is right how everything comes out of Applied Research right Hilbert wasn't interested I mean initially he became interested later the computer was invented all paths all right to answer math a fundamental mathematical problem he wasn't set he didn't set out to invent a computer okay sorry I've gone on too long in 1950 Hilbert curing writes a paper that says look in effect could it be the case that what we call thinking is what a computer does I'm distorting a little bit but that's just of it and of course that's the idea again that we all we all just take in in the air that we breathe right the idea is that thinking is nothing more than what a computer does it manipulate symbols very simple symbols and it's part of the notion of a computer that it can be made out of anything right I mean Mike this computer is made out of metal and silicon and whatever but you know computers used to be made out of vacuum tubes and you can I meant to bring I have a picture it's a picture of a Turing machine what's called a Turing machine a simple computer that's made out of Lego okay so you can make a computer out of anything as long as it's the kind of thing that can do what Turing said something has to do to be a computer okay so I often say to my students can jello can you make a computer out of jello and people have differing views and then you know and then later than the I said can you make a computer out of pretzels are you and the answer eventually they get the idea that the answer I want is well you can if it can do what a machine has to do to be a computer and you can't if it can't right so lots of things potentially can be a computer and in particular and here's the idea right this thing could be a computer just because it's made out of tissue doesn't mean that it can't be a computer if it can do what touring said something has to do to be a computer then this thing can be a computer so now we have an idea about how to solve the problem of what thinking is given that we're now committed or we want to be committed to the idea that the mind is a physical thing and the answer is that it the mind the brain does it in the way that a computer does it it manipulates symbols and it does what we now call computations ok all right so see here's where we're at right come 1960 ish we we have we've kind of the the the mainstream view about the mind is kind of gelled and for our purposes the mind is has three features ok it's where thought happens and nowhere else in the mind it's just the brain and nothing else and it does the thinking by being a computer in effect ok and I take it we all agree around this table in principle that that's what if not that's not what we personally think that we agree that that's what most people think is that right do we agree that that's what most people think Furness so let me restrict it then let me say in the context of people who are as it were formally committed to thinking about these things this is the mainstream view and in a way whether it's mainstream in the in the statistical center no it doesn't much matter because what I want to suggest is that this is the view that of course most neuroscientists would accept and I know that that's true because I've talked to enough of them and insofar as it's view that they accept it's the view that they report to journalists who then report to us and so on and so forth ok so whether people who you know by the books about the brain understand that this is what they're committed to this is in effect what they're hearing okay so there's other things one could say no doubt I've distorted somewhat and left details out and there's other theses that you might want to say we're committed to officially but let's suppose these are the three so one thing you might say if you're a critical you know critical neuroscientist you wanna say well what should we critique I mean we can critique any of these three all of them right my critique I mean you know subject to some sort of critical scrutiny so what I'm going to do next is I'm gonna this now this was my brief was to to was to to critique this one to look at this one okay the idea that the mind is the exclusive locus of thought and we'll see in a second what that means when I say that that everyone officially believes this course I don't mean everyone literally because for any view that you might have there's gonna be people who disagree and that's undoubtedly true particularly among philosophers so there are lots of people including the ones I'm going to talk about who disagree with some of this so Searle John Searle here I'll read something else on the board even though you know you all know who he is John Searle was a philosopher at Berkeley and he actually believes that the mind is identical to the brain but he doesn't think that the mind is a computational device and he's got this very famous argument that says that the mind can't be a computational device if by computation you mean what toring meant and what most of us mean so he thinks that in other words he thinks in effect but that this isn't the answer to the question how does the brain do it he thinks the brain does do it and the answer to the question how does it is still mysterious he thinks that whatever it does sorry however it does it it doesn't invert you of the special properties the special physical properties of the brain and not not the fact that the brain manipulate symbols if it does manipulate symbols so that there will be philosophers and scientists undoubtedly who disagree with one or more of these one or more of these I I don't know I mean so for example you know in the old days we could we could refer to John Eccles John Nichols was actually Australian and he was a Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist who believed that like Descartes that the brain that there was a mind that was separate from the brain and he spent some time thinking about how this could happen he wrote a he and a very famous philosopher called Karl Popper wrote a book together about how this could be and they addressed various objections to it and so on so apples I don't know who's around now but Eccles would be somebody who didn't believe this and didn't believe this and I don't know what he believed about this pub wasn't mainstream enough view a mainstream enough in his day probably too for him to have had a view about so yeah so of course there's gonna be a differing a differ differing of opinion about various of these things at the same time as these views were gelling in the 50s 40s also before the war various philosophers and psychologists I haven't put up the psychologist because I don't know if know enough about that history but a number of philosophers were arguing that the mind was actually quite different from the picture of the mind you get from Descartes so is actually in some sense Descartes and his heirs that these philosophers were addressing and they began to argue that the mind in effect is not just right the the soul locus of thought whatever the mind is thought is something that is in some sense bigger than the mind so I put these up here I know just they're good to mention a cocktail party so Martin Heidegger very famous German philosopher had very elaborate views about the role of the environment the social environment in thinking maurice merleau-ponty is a French philosophers now become very much in vogue especially among neuroscientists and I can tell you more but a later it well worth reading Marilyn panties very hard to read Heidegger hard to read merleau-ponty but really well worth reading him his his masterwork is called the phenomenology of perception so it's a big book and I once heard a philosopher say there are two kinds of great philosophy books there's one kind of philosophy book where you read it and you get to the end you think what the hell was that about and there's another kind of philosophy you read it and you get to the end and you say what the hell was that about but you also have a tingle so this is one of those books where you get a tingle I that was exactly the experience I had as an undergraduate I read I thought what the hell is this about but I I knew that it was something interesting and important so Marilyn Polti was one of the things that he focused on was was vision and his and he actually was very interested so I'm going off on a tangent here but he was particularly interested in contemporary neurology contemporary relatively contemporary neurology that was much of which was focused on soldiers coming back from the First World War I mean so this is quite a bit later but this was the neurology he was interested in a pretty neurology of two folks called Goldstein and Gelb and he was so he was he was a neuro philosopher before there were no flossers he really thought that what contemporary neuroscience lesion studies showed was that vision is not something that happens in your head it happens partly in your head and partly in the spatial environment that you navigate when you're seeing things okay and then little big Stein the in a way the sort of hero of modern anglo-american philosophy had views that had more to do with the nature of language but again Vik and Stein thought that that we think in part with language and since language is essentially something that happens in public it's essentially a tool for people to interact with whatever thinking you do can't be excuse will be done in your head right because it's done with language and languages it's not in your head in some sense okay whatever exactly these guys thought they were united in a view i suggest according to which there are things outside the mind that constitute what Andy Clark philosopher calls scaffolding cognitive scaffolding in other words there are things outside the mind that are support structures to the thought that in some sense originates in the mind maybe but spills out outside the mind okay I haven't told you exactly I mean this should sound puzzling to you I hope it sounds puzzling and I'll try to say something a little more clear about it but anyways these are some of these from intellectual origins of it the can in contemporary philosophy and psychology this this is actually true you have to say this is this is an interdisciplinary sub discipline in philosophy in psychology that's usually called situated cognition the situated part refers to the idea that thinking happens in an environment and we'll see what that means in a second standard accounts of situated cognition usually divide the claims of situated cognition into into three so in other words situated cognition in general not everybody again but in general is committed to or interested in three distinct ideas the first idea is that the mind is embodied okay now as I said before we inherit from Descartes the idea that the mind is this thing that is separate from the body but many many people many philosophers observed that there are features of the fact the features of our bodies features of ourselves as entities that have bodies that seem to affect how it is that we think about things so there's lots of very very simple cliched examples of this the one that people often mention is thinking is counting with your fingers right now this is so trivial is to be almost uninteresting but think about it for a second what when you keep track of things quantities or when you count with your fingers I mean I I still do this it's not the case that you're moving your fingers in parallel with your thinking about things right it's that your fingers are actually keeping track of things so for example what you know it's a self-revelation of a deep sort I you know you count in tens and when you count when you have to count things in tens you use one finger to signal ten and then you start again two fingers signal 20 and so on now if at some moment you stop me in the process of counting from tens and I wasn't I couldn't consult my fingers either in feel or visually I wouldn't know what number I was asked right I'm literally using my fingers as placeholders for a quantity is it a my I don't want to sound maybe I'm neurologically different or impaired or something but this is a common idea it seems to be I mean it does seem there's something very fundamental about it I mean until you it's pointed out to you it seems trivial but you start to think about it it's very puzzling I mean there's a famous anecdote that people often tell as well in this context of anecdote about Richard Fineman who you know one stage working on some problem you know took a piece of paper and a pencil and started working out the problem and solve the problem somebody said Tim Wow you know how did you think that up you know how did that come into your head he said well it didn't wasn't in my head it was on the paper yeah but I know you wrote it on the paper but how did you think about it in your head and he said you know how do you work it on your anything I I didn't I worked it out on the paper right now of course he was in notoriously you know difficult person to deal with but but I mean there's something right about that yeah there's something right about the idea that that our bodies engage in some sort of cognitive activity not disconnected from our brains but in some sense in a way that is beyond goes beyond room what we're consciously able to to do ourselves without the body anyhow let me give you a more scientific example of this this kind of case an example from book of Andy Clark's called super sizing the mind it's very good book this is a robot that was built by the Honda company and it's called as Moe I can't remember what has most and swords and it's an acronym and here's what supposed to be interesting about as moe so when people started incidentally the situated cognition has got a huge amount of support from robotics for reasons that you'll see in a second this is not an airy-fairy philosophers idea this is an idea that has the most practical consequences so here's the idea when people started trying to build robots so they need they needed to work out mathematically how joints have to move in order to get bodily movement and translation and so what they did was they wrote down explicitly things like in order to reach for something you have three joints and they have to move in a certain way in a certain order and so you write down all the movements that they have to make relative to the thing that they're aiming for right so and if I'm reaching for the coke my wrist my elbow and my shoulder have to move in a certain way so you could write down explicitly the angles through which they have to move the time that they have to move in and the order they have to move in and similarly you could do that for a robot if you wanted to get it to walk down the stairs or you have to bend and you have to lean and you have to Ben gift early and so on and what people found when they started doing this was that you could indeed build robots that moved and they moved very very artificially they moved sort of like robots in the movies right they moved like this this robot among others I don't if this was the first was built on a different principle and the principle was don't write down in your computer code the explicit directions for limb movements write down things that will get the robot moving in certain way and then let it get a response from the environment and then move in response to the environment so you'd be something like this get it to move forward and then when it's foot lands on the stair then it gets an instruction from its code to do something else in other words the idea leave blanks in the code for the environment to enter in and give the robot as it were further instructions and we need to do that apparently I've never seen a Samoan in motion no doubt their YouTube YouTube videos we could look at you get not only successful motion but emotion that looks much smoother it looks much more like human motion so this is an example of cognitive scaffolding right rather than put all the information into the head as it were of the robot you put enough information in for it to do certain things and you allow the environment to feedback on its motion and the feedback then in turn generates new states of the of the robot and empirically it simply turns out that this gives you a better result okay so that that would be an example of of how thinking in this case this case movement I mean it's it's a kind of thinking of course how you could get a more successful model of this aspect of cognition this aspect of motor behavior how you could get a better better version of it by letting the environment as it were contain some of the information rather than the robot in this case it contains information about the spatial organization of the environment it's a particularly good representation of the spatial organization of the environment because it is the spatial organization of the environment right you get the idea okay so that's the first thesis that the mind is embodied incidentally uh Yun mentioned Charles Taylor and I can't help but mention Charles Taylor's context Charles Taylor was a teacher of mine actually another hero of mine and he's been arguing this kind of thing for decades literally decades I mean he and he gets it from European philosophy but he's generated a version of this that has been around for analytic philosophers who could understand him right philosophers like me could have understood him did understand him could have understood him 3040 years ago if only we had been interested in reading his work so but now of course we've discovered this ourselves and the nineties and now it's true okay here's the second here's the second thesis which is usually characterized as the the claim that the mind is embedded so embedded here refers particularly to embed it in the physical environment so let's take a simple example it's just quite a bit like the Osmo example except it's not an example of motor behavior it's an example from Daniel Dennett when you learn how to cook properly you learn that the first thing you have to do is the meson class right you take all your ingredients and you measure them and you weigh them and you set them out in front of you before you begin to cook and in particularly you set them out in a particular order you set them out in the order that's not how you do it okay see okay the truth of it is that the truth of it is the truth of it is it's funny because I don't I never knew how to cook properly either I do know what I know is alright but when you start doing this it makes a huge difference it really does it's amazing now what then it claims is that again are there any real chefs here anyone no okay so I can just make it out so what he claims is that chefs will not only measure the ingredients but they put them in a particular order why for the following reason if you are trying to memorize recipe so start with 50 50 grams of butter then put in a liter of milk and so on that's mentally demanding right that's a hard memory task but if you put your ingredients in an order then you've translated a memory task namely first the flour then the milk then the whatever that is you've translated that into a much easier task namely a task of visual perception right so now my memory of these ingredients is located as a word not in my head but but on the on the counter in front of me in in in information represented by the order of these ingredients okay so what I'm doing in effect is I'm taking a hard problem and I'm solving it not in my mind but in the world and then of course my mind is it's got to be there at some stage in order to interact with the world but I interact with the world and I get job done much easier okay so that's an example again of calling the scaffolding I'm using I'm offloading as they say a hard problem from my brain into the environment as the second example I saw one of the readings I said for you it was a lovely paper called how the how the cockpit computes its speed and I thought we have some discussion about this it'll take me too long to explain it I'll just give you the gist of it I really encourage you to read the paper it's a beautiful paper by someone called Edward Hutchins who studies his main interest actually is in isn't ships and he's written up a fantastic book on how a naval ship functions and I set this paper just because it's cup makes the same point but much more briefly and the point just is this right doing a complicated activity like landing a plane it requires two people at least and a bunch of instruments this is the main instrument because it's hard but what Hutchins shows is that the way in which the cognitive problem of how to do things sort of the plane land safely is a problem that's spread out across the two pilots the pilot the copilot and the instruments in other words if you believe the standard view about how psychological functions work the standard computational theory of of cognition and you and you write down the cognitive steps that are involved in landing a plane it turns out that those steps are not executed either in one pilots head or the other pilots head or in the tool or right if they're executed in a way that's diffused across the pilots and the - and the instruments so what Hutchins says and he says this literally right that the computation required to land this plane is done in the cockpit right the whole of the cockpit is as it were the cognitive apparatus that's landing the plane what is the show so it shows that cognition right at least in this case doesn't exist purely in an individual's brain in this case it exists in at least two individuals brains and also in the instruments and the proof of that is if you take any of that part away you won't get the cognitive job done you won't be able to do the motor behavior required to land the plane okay so the idea then is that cognition is again all floating or the mind we're all floating problems into other people's minds and into objects like tools like instruments like this in order to do complicated tasks efficiently or even to do them at all so Hutchins is particularly interested in the in the role of instruments and tools in cognitive activities it's really really fascinating in the long and the long version of this he actually spent a number of months on a week's on a u.s. naval ship and he shows that various cognitive tasks are carried out by a whole bunch of of the shipmates right they're carried carried out across many minds and many of the tools on the ship so that's that's the kind of more elaborate example but again there's lots of obvious things lots of lots of familiar things that we do all the time that look like we're embedding cognitive activity in the environment right so I gave you the chef's child what was the child I can't remember what the child was the Scrabble player right you can't do Scrabble unless you move the your pieces around or I can't I can't do Scrabble Ohio I only can see what the options are by actually moving the pieces around the blind man right who taps the taps his cane against the against the environment and here's the echo and so on lots and lots of examples like this which which seem to involve some part of the cognate cognitive activity being carried out or implemented in in the physical world okay any questions about that you you I'm not sure I agree with with examples you you gave as instances of what you have in mind but I think in principle the idea that this would apply to what we used to call cognition but not emotion is a mistake just because we did this in the 60s and we discovered that it was a mistake to exclude emotion from what we called cognition it might turn out to be different here but a priori if we're gonna take the lessons of the hit of history we should say well in principle it should apply across cognition now we're anyways we could talk about those examples I haven't given this much luck Paul Griffiths got a paper about this where he argue knows maybe so but I can't think off top my head of an example that I feel very confident about but I can't see why not actually I mean so I'm just thinking aloud for a second I mean there are certainly lots of cases one could imagine the kind of thing Lawrence was mentioned this morning lots of cases one could imagine where an emotion is only appropriate or is only generated in a particular environment whether that would count as offloading the emotion to the VAR maybe yeah so that seems right I mean so that's one way in which it might be external as the other way might be just to kind of this is much more simple-minded idea that certain kinds of behavioral cues think of it this way right we have to keep track of when it's appropriate to display certain kinds of emotions and we could in principle have a long list of it right so it's only appropriate to jump up and scream enthusiastic with enthusiasm when you're watching a hockey game but not when you're listening to an orchestra so we could in principle keep a list of it but I take it we could just as well use the cues you mentioned right in a dark quiet room you're not supposed to jump up and do the wave right so so maybe that would be an example of it yeah that's in a way an even more interesting version that's that's a version of this according to which it might even be the case that the emotion itself is somehow dependent on more than one person right yes so my intuitions are all are like that are the more mainstream intuitions though I do think that you know the kind of feeling that one there's there certainly are certain feelings that you can only have with another person present particularly a loved one right you can only have a sense of I don't know a sense of a certain kind of sense of closeness which has a phenomenal feel to it when you're with someone who you feel close to right I mean it's it's easy as it were to imagine certain you know you know if I put me in the scanner you say okay you know get yourself into an angry mood I can do that pretty easily could I get myself into a mood where I feel that kind of intimate warmth that I have with someone I love I don't know it's an empirical question could I feel schadenfreude by myself I don't know I feel it so much that I I should be able to but I don't know as I I think these are interesting questions yeah I I don't have clear views about yet nobody you yeah I'm you know I actually when I last time I taught this I had a bunch of students who who actually seen many as soon as class actually seemed to believe that they were less capable of doing things that their parents could do because they had more waste offloaded so they they seemed it was quite easy to convince them that you know certain kinds of memories like memories for phone numbers and so on we're probably not exactly atrophied but let's use ah great question that's a great question so the answer is no you could be a duelist sorry did you say is it a way of avoiding dualism yeah so I mean in a certain sense the question of dualism and the situated cognition are are different questions there you can have different views about one right you need not have the same view but both so what I mean is you could believe that everything happens in the brain in which case you're not a duelist but you're also not a situated cognition person you could believe that it happens in the brain and the environment of course the environments also physical right so you're again not a duelist but you're a situated cognition person so I don't know the two things are linked though I suspect that you're right about something that down the track we're gonna see that certain kinds of specials socially especially social things are very hard to figure out if you're exclusively looking inside the brain and then you might be right and you might be driven to a certain kind of dualism yeah so that that's that's I could see I can see that happening you well I do not respond I agree with you I think I said let me do things I think I mean I have no investment in saying that this is a big image it's not my work so if it were my work I would have the big investment I think it'd be an interesting project to look at the way in which external ISM is described so for example I'm quite interested though I don't I haven't done any work on this yet but I'm quite interested in the idea of how we characterize tools so no doubt right anthropologists are not surprised the idea that tools are important it'd be interesting to know though whether how tools are characterized in for example psychological research anthropological research philosophical research and so on I think one of the things that philosophers are interested in is the idea that the tool is as it were a piece of the cognition now maybe again maybe that's an obvious thing in anthropology but but look I mean of course in general of course I agree with you I mean it's a sad fact right we all live in our little worlds I mean look you don't have to go to anthropology one of the things that is very shocking to an analytic flosser is other philosophers were saying this and they were saying it 50 60 70 years ago so I have colleagues right McGill philosophy department is a is a pluralist department at has both continental and philosophers so you know we talk about this stuff and my own colleagues will say yeah you know we did this 50 years ago wives is a discovery so yeah I mean it's I agree it's it's sad it's very sad you absolutely no I agree with that I mean I think yeah this is not an intellectual achievement but it's it's a the lucky happenstance that that this community is a community that includes people like roboticists and primatologists and and so on it's though again I think it's it's it's rather unfair to the continental philosophers I mean you know as I said before reading Marilyn Ponte I mean this is a man who who was absolutely fascinated with what was contemporary neuroscience right and that he should only be rediscovered 50 years later just seems like a you know it just reveals our own the ignorance of our own field I mean when I talk to Chuck Taylor and you know Taylor Taylor did his PhD at Oxford right at a moment when Oxford philosophy was the pinnacle of philosophy and he said you know he's brilliant royal names you won't know but names that you know of people who are read by every undergraduates you know they were utterly ignorant of anything outside their own and this big leader of auxin right even now you go to Oxford I take it from what I hear of Oxford Oxford sounds like a like sounds like the Normandy invasion to me I mean you know that I mean the only things that are interesting are things that other Oxford philosophers are talking about so you know that's scandalous right and and I think philosophy is particularly at Oxford wet Oxford philosophy went through peered was particularly bad in that respect so okay let me just do two things very quickly because time is short anyway this is the most interesting stuff so here one way in which this might be a little bit different to some of what's gone before is it is this third thesis about situated cognition this is a thesis this is an idea that was developed by or at least it's associated with two philosophers Andy Clarke and David Chalmers two analytic philosophers this is actually a thing III believe the stuff the other stuff I've talked about I don't in fact believe this but I think it's it's terribly terribly interesting and it's become quite a popular idea this is the claim that the mind is extended and what this claim is saying is that literally so before you might say look when I think I'm thinking with this tool right this tool is part of the fault but this tool is not part of my mind right that's what makes it makes it a tool because it's not part of my mind i-it's an essential part of my thinking it's something my mind needs to do the thinking but it's not part of my mind the extended mind thesis says that when a tool like that is functioning in your cognitive economy it is literally part of your mind okay so it's a metaphysical claim and here's this is a very famous example that so this this paper is also in your reading and it's very short and it's very easy to read and I encourage you to read it the argument goes like this or it's not an argument it's it's a kind of thought of it a thought experiment then there's a more formal argument afterwards thought experiment goes like this consider Inga Inga is in Manhattan and she sees a sign for an exhibit at the MoMA and she would like to go see this exhibit so she says aha I remembered that the MoMA is on 57th Street or wherever it is and 57th Street is over there so she reorients herself and goes to 57th Street now consider in contrast Otto Otto has Alzheimer's and he's forgetting things so he's begun to keep a notebook where he writes down things that are important for his daily life that he thinks he might forget he sees the same advertisement that ingesys for the exhibit he thinks I'd love to see that exhibit but I can't remember where the MoMA is so I open he opens his notebook and he finds in the notebook the MoMA is on 57th Street so he reorients himself he goes to 57th Street now according to Clark and Chalmers here's what's going on here's the analysis a particular part of Inga's mind is her memory which happens to include the memory of where the MoMA is that memory is not is no longer part of Otto's mind but it is part of his notebook and in particular that thing in his notebook functions in his mental life in exactly the same way as Inga's memory does and by a particular principle which you'd have to reject if you don't agree with this since the notebook functions in exactly the same way for Otto as Inga's memory does that notebook deserves to be called part of Otto's mind literally part of his mind okay so if this were true then it would be literally true not just that thinking requires the environment but then when thinking makes use of the environment the environment counts as your mind now as I say I don't happen to agree with this but it's a complicated story why not I think it's a it's a really fascinating idea and if you don't like it there are some complicated things you have to consider like for example whether this is true or not yeah there are ways to make it more I mean of course it's a that kind of objection is important there are ways to make it more compelling in a certain way the easiest way to make it more compelling is something like this right now suppose it's not a notebook suppose it's a computer so he writes down all the important things now suppose we're living at a time when the computer so sophisticated that it's really really small now suppose you could take the small computer or you could take a chip and you could stick it in your brain ah at the moment that the chip is in your head it seems much more plausible that as part of your mind now ask yourself what on what principle could you base the idea that something has to be in your skull to count as your mind that looks like a prejudice right because we're not committed to the idea at least we haven't yet defended the idea that your mind has to be inside your skull okay right so you can get at the intuition that some of there's an arbitrariness in the idea that your mind has to be where your brain is which at least needs a defense and you could you could do it that way yeah you sure so there's yeah there's been an awful lot of work on that and this kind of view does presuppose a bunch of things about the mind in particular you won't surprise you from this definition what makes them information canister is the role of place the notion of a role a particular cognitive function is there's a long story about this and I can tell you more about it but that is a core idea so although I don't know that philosophers are hesitant these days to give kind of definitions of things because there is yet to be a successful definition in philosophy right for every definition there's a counter example but I think there are lots and lots of theories about what the mind is and you might not be able to run this argument you've got a different sort of theory that that's certainly true now I guess for our purposes though what's really interesting about this is that however you define the notion of mind if you define in a way where this comes out true then it turns out that the mind can't be the brain right because the brain is stuck inside your skull and if the mind is outside of it then you immediately get a consequence that is central to what we're doing here right I mean it surely would be a terrible blow to neuroscience to discover since neuroscientists presumably are officially supposed to stick to inside the skull right it would be a big blow to neuro scientists to discover that in principle neuroscience can't give the whole story about the mind because part of that story involves something that is in the brain okay now of course ultimately down the track even if this were true nothing stops a neuroscientist from you know breeding tables and chairs into the lab I mean there's no rule that says you have to stick to that but and in fact I see this potentially as a as a constructive view right this is not meant to be a supportive saying before right this isn't meant to be a criticism this is meant to be in effect a suggestion namely that you consider the possibility that you look at not just how the brain works but how the brain interacts with its environment that would be a richer neuroscientist neuroscience than the neuroscience we've got yeah yeah so I think that's exactly the right kind of case to think about right I mean it look here's the kind of intuition leave this aside for a second for a second right suppose one day we will very shortly no doubt have artificial neurons right so imagine taking out one of my neurons and putting an artificial neuron in right it looks very implausible that somehow that isn't the very same mind that was there before now to do it over and over and over gradually replacing one neuron at a time it looks like there's no reason any stage to say that is in my mind of course at the end you might have a device that is partly here partly in my pocket partly you know in my lab it looks like it's my mind it's doing the very same thing and that is a crucial idea here that what it does is what it is and you might disagree with that let me just make one last discuss the very last topic I'm not going to do this justice but I'll mention it now and we could talk about it I'm giving another lecture tomorrow I'm happy to come back to this it's in a way the most interesting thing this is I think of this as kind of a cutting edge of of critical neuroscience partly because this address is what Suparna was asking for this morning namely some thoughts about you know real experiments that you could do that would that would address the idea that the mind is not something that's exclusively you know that's identical to brain function or that's not exclusively in here so as a study from two years ago by Kim and colleagues and it's a genetic study we just see how quickly I can do this um it's a study looking at a receptor neuro brain receptor for a hormone called oxytocin everyone's heard about oxytocin it's the love hormone it's right that's all nonsense but hey you've heard about it right so oxytocin is this brain produced hormone it seems to be involved in various pro-social behaviors among other things and it turns out astonishingly to me it's not just the hormone the quantity of the hormone that seems to correlate with pro-social behavior but there are certain genetic properties of the receptor so there's the hormone there's the receptor right everything has to bind to a receptor in the brain to be effective there are different genes that can make the very same receptor in different people and amazingly the gene variants that make this receptor themselves seem to be correlated with more or less pro-social behavior so if you have one variant you might in certain circumstances exhibit one behavior and another variant another behavior that's astonishing to me because this is a level so far away from pro-social behavior that there must be a bazillion steps in the middle in order to generate this pro-social behavior yet we can find this this correlation at least if this turns out to be right here's the interesting thing they were looking at help-seeking behavior so the kind of thing that you do when you're under stress it's exams and you're stressed and your boyfriend's just left you and so what do you do you're going to talk to your friend and you're complaining your cry and you do this kind of thing they were looking at this cross culture in koreans native koreans and korean americans so here's the idea under stress americans exhibit more sorry big heart under conditions that aren't stressful Americans exhibit more help taking behavior than Koreans right because in American culture asking for help is is accepted and Korean culture is less accepted under stress what's going to happen well it turns out that if you have a certain variant of the oxytocin receptors een when you're under stress you're more likely to ask for help than if you have the other variant okay so in North Americans now those of you who are North American who have the relevant variant will under stress be more likely to ask for help from a friend those of you who don't have this variant will be less likely to ask for help under stress what about Koreans they have the same variance but under stress neither variant behaves in a way that asks re-engages it more help seeking behavior than the other in other words they don't show this difference under stress why presumably because in Korean culture it's not okay to ask for help under stress okay so here's a genetic feature that correlates with a certain behavior and if you'd only look at one one group say North Americans you'd say oh there's a gene for help seeking behavior this turns out to be what can Candler calls an outside the skin form of gene expression this gene expression is it help seeking gene only when the culture that you're living in licenses that behavior okay so this seems to be an example of the most fundamental kind right this is this is the most fundamental kind of neuroscience right its genetic neuroscience this is an example where in order to understand what the brain is doing in this case what the genes that make the brain is doing you have to know facts about the culture that the brain lives in so separa and i have talked over years about the idea that there should not only be a situated cognition there should be something that you call situated neuroscience this is a form of neuroscience in which you have to know about the environment that the brain lives in in order to know what the brain is doing okay we can let's come back to this you're interested to me this is very very interesting and again this is what's beautiful about this study in my view is that this is a neuron this is not it's not a bunch of philosophers right this is these are a bunch of geneticists published in PNAS for God's sake right I mean this is this is this is mainstream nurses and by the way personally I actually have encountered a much more sympathetic attitude among geneticists to the kind of critical neuroscience perspective that among neuroscientists when I say sympathetic I don't necessarily mean I've asked them what they think but when you read their work it seems to me geneticists are more open to the idea of the environment being relevant that neuroscientists in part because of the facts right in part because genetics is now beginning to be interested in the way in which the environment affects the genes namely the epigenetic processes that are relevant so geneticists just in virtue of their own work seem to be gravitating toward the idea that we're sort of trying to come to grow

Channel: Transcultural Psychiatry

Views: 8,757

Rating: 4.8740158 out of 5

Keywords: Ian Gold, McGill University, Descartes, cognitive scaffolding, situated cognition, critical neuroscience, mind, brain, Transcultural Psychiatry

Id: lYjlyf_FU0A

Length: 69min 41sec (4181 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2013