raymond tallis frcp fmedsci winchester why neuroscience1
TRANSCRIPT
Why My Talk Will Be Short(ish)
It’s day three of the meetingNo-one ever complained of a talk that was too short
I want you to give me a hard time
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Clarification
Not a critique of neuroscience
Neuroscience is the Queen of the Sciences
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My position (1)Neuroscience reveals some of the
most important necessary conditions of behaviour and awareness.
What it does not do is provide a satisfactory account of the sufficient conditions of awareness and behaviour.
The mistaken idea that it does is neuroscientism.
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My position (2)
While to live a human life requires a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this that living a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order.
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The Roots of Neuroscientism
Confuse correlation with causationConfuse causation with identifyThe brain lights up when I feel sad therefore
feeling sad is the brain lighting up
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Some Children of Neuro-Scientism
Neuro-aestheticsNeuro-lawNeuro-economicsNeuro-sociologyNeuro-politicsNeuro-theologyU.S.W.
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Socrates (via Plato)
“Fancy being unable to distinguish between the cause of a thing and the condition without which it could not be a cause! It is this latter, as it seems to me, that most people, groping in the dark, call a cause--attaching to it a name to which it has no right”. Phaedo 98b
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Focus on Human Consciousness
More calamitous consequences of ‘neuralising’ human as opposed to animal consciousnessAvoid empty arguments about the nature and reach of animal consciousnessHuman consciousness makes the impossibility of fitting mind into matter more obvious
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Consequences of Neuro-scientism
Darwinising the mind
Reduction of the mind to a way-station in a causal net
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Responses to Critique of Neuroscientism
‘One fine day’ neuroscience will produce an adequate account of consciousness
That which neuroscience cannot see doesn’t really exist - the ‘I’, free will etc
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A Serious Inconsistency
They don’t doubt that they think they are selves or that they have the illusion that they act freely and yet there is no conceivable neural explanation of these phenomena.
How would a nervous system that has no basis for a self have the basis for the illusion of the self?
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Bill of Fare
Perception and IntentionalityPhysical Science, Phenomenal Consciousness
and the Disappearance of AppearanceViewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and
the Self Where Now?
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The Problematic Perspective Neuroscientistic OrthodoxyThere is only one sort of stuff, namely matter – the
physical stuff of physics, chemistry and physiology – and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain… We can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition and growth.
Daniel Dennett Consciousness Explained
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Bill of Fare
Perception and IntentionalityPhysical Science, Phenomenal Consciousness
and the Disappearance of AppearanceViewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and
the SelfWhere Now?
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Glass
“Glass”
Neural activity
Identity
Perception
Light as Cause
Intentionality of gaze
Limitations of the Physiology of Visual Perception
The inward causal chain explains how the light gets into my brain but not how this results in a gaze that looks out.
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Glass
“Glass”
Neural activity
Identity
Perception
Light as Cause
Intentionality of gaze
The Mystery of Intentionality if Neuromania Were True
My perception of the glass would require the neural activity in the visual cortex to reach causally upstream to the events that caused them.
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Additional Problems with the Physiology of Perception
Why does the counter-causal intentionality stop at a particular point?
How does perception assemble a stable object out of transient events?
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A Mystery we Take for Granted
The ordinary inference implicit in everyday perception that the events causally upstream of the nerve impulses are manifestations of something that transcends those events – namely an object that is the relatively permanent possibility of endless events – makes intentionality even more mysterious.
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The Bounce-Back of Intentionality
Marks the point at which perceptions are received/arrive Without ‘bounce-back’ there would be no demarcation between input and output : the organism would not be a ‘centre’ as matter doesn’t have centres (or peripheries)Nothing distinctive about the neural correlates of consciousness
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Heart of the Trouble
The unintelligibility of the claim that the interaction between two material objects (a glass, my brain) will make one appear to the other
Causal interaction does not generate appearance
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Bill of Fare
Perception and Intentionality
Physical Science, Phenomenal Consciousness and the Disappearance of AppearanceViewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and the SelfWhere Now?
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Physical Science: The Disappearance of Appearance
Replacement of phenomenal appearance by quantitative measurements
The description of matter (in-itself) is essentially mathematical: it has only primary qualities which are not qualities at all
The elimination of secondary qualitiesThe elimination of all (phenomenal)
qualitiesWinchester Why Neuroscience 29
Dennett Again on the Orthodoxy
“the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition and growth.”
These principles are mathematical: they relate quantities and by-pass qualities – which is why they can be common to all these things.
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The Disappearance of Appearance. The Bottom Line
Nothing in physical science (including – or especially - QM!) can explain why a physical object such as a brain should find, uncover, or create, appearances. Matter and energy, as understood scientifically, do not intrinsically have appearances.Material objects require consciousness in order to appear.
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A materialist explanation of consciousness rooted in physical science must fail because matter and energy, as understood scientifically, do not intrinsically have appearances, never mind those corresponding to secondary qualities. Material objects require consciousness in order to appear – and then they will have a particular appearance that will depend upon the viewpoint of the conscious individual observing it.
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Bill of Fare Preliminary commentsPerception and IntentionalityPhysical Science, Phenomenal
Consciousness, and the Disappearance of Appearance
Viewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and
the SelfWhere Now?
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Viewpoints: Awkward and Inescapable
Intentionality is most evident when the the perceived object is related to an ‘I’
Egocentric space: near, far etcThe material brain is ownerlessMaterial world has no centres nor
peripheries Winchester Why Neuroscience 38
Bill of Fare Preliminary commentsPerception and IntentionalityPhysical Science, Phenomenal
Consciousness, and the Disappearance of Appearance
Viewpointless matter
The Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and the Self
Where Now?
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Unity-in Multiplicity of Consciousness
We are co-conscious of many separate things in a conscious field
Models of integration do not deliver unity-in-multiplicity - i.e. merging without mushing
Models of binding do not deliver unity never mind unity-in-multiplicity
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Binding Problem: Would-Be Solutions
Synchronous activity over the brainPlace of convergence of activity:
claustrumElectromagnetic fieldsQuantum coherence
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Neurophysiology of Memory
Memory as a cerebral deposit
‘Stored’ in the form of the altered reactivity of the brain
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Sluggish RecallNo semantic memory of factsNo explicit episodic memories of events, that
it locates in the past;No autobiographical memories it locates in
its own past. No explicit sense of time, of the past, even
less of a collective past where shared history is located.
No active recallNo nostalgia
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Memory in a Dish?The past states of a material object cannot be
retained in the present state of a material objectMemories are explicitly of the past Tensed time is not evident in the material worldExplicit memories (the only real memories) have
double intentionality: reach back to experience which reaches back to object that caused the experience
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Gotcha!
Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, Roy Mukamel, Michal Harel, Rafael Malach, Itzhak Fried ‘Internally Generated Reactivation of Single Neurons in Human Hippocampus During Free Recall’ Science 3rd October 2008 Vol 322: No 5898 pp.96-101.
Recording from single cells in people being investigated for the source of epileptic discharges
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No Tenses in Matter
There is no ‘now’
There is therefore no ‘past’, or ‘future
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Tensed Time and the Material World
Once Einstein said that the problem of Now worried him. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future but that this difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter for painful but inevitable resignation. Rudolf Carnap
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Tensed Time and the Material World
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein, 1952
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Tensed Time and NeuroscienceNeuroscience is ultimately a biophysical or
physical science.A consistent materialism should not allow for the
possibility of memory, of the sense of the past. It only seems to do so because observers,
viewpoint, consciousness are smuggled into the image of the successive states of the brain, making it seem that later states can be about earlier states.
In short, neural accounts of memory are a cheat
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References Critique of neuro-determinism:
Raymond Tallis ‘Can I possibly be free?’ New Atlantis Summer 2010 (can download from the net)
Against naturalisation of knowledge
Raymond Tallis The Knowing Animal. A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 2005)
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Bill of Fare Preliminary commentsPerception and IntentionalityPhysical Science, Phenomenal
Consciousness, and the Disappearance of Appearance
Viewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and
the Self
Where Now?
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Urgent Questions (1)
Why, if the brain is not the basis of consciousness, is it so intimately bound up with our awareness and our behaviour?
What are we to make of the genuine advances of neuroscience?
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Urgent Questions (2)Should we abandon the brain as a starting point for our understanding of consciousness?Where would the brain fit into a metaphysics, an epistemology, an ontology, that denies the brain a place at their centre?How shall we deal with the fact that we are evolved organisms as well as persons?
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